Last night, Evie came into our bedroom and curled up between Frankie and me, with River gurgling and dreaming in his bassinet beside us, at about 11 pm, a couple of hours after her bedtime but without having fallen asleep, and I asked her What’s up, and she said Nothing in that way that, as parents, you know it’s not nothing, so we asked again together more gently as Evie nuzzled her head into my shoulder, and she said she was scared, and I said Scared of what, and she said of someone coming through the skylight in hers and Tilda’s room and taking her, and this came shortly after Frankie and I’d finished watching an episode of crime show Mr Inbetween called ‘Socks Are Important’, in which Mr Inbetween is looking after his daughter (who is the same age as Evie at that point in the series) and her friend, a girl whose father, a friend of Mr Inbetween’s, has just committed suicide, and at the beginning of the episode they’re in a large sports store in Marrickville where Mr Inbetween is shopping for socks and the girls walk off to test out the bikes only for the friend to be abducted, a moment in which Frankie and I had to pause the laptop to discuss whether to watch any further, given that the kidnapping of our kids is perhaps our worst nightmare—and, even though this was a fictional representation, Marrickville is just down the road from us; I’ve even been in that particular sports store—but we watched the episode nonetheless and were soon after having to steel ourselves to talk about the fear with Evie, of how not to leave our side, ever, but also how to be street-safe when she’s old enough to have to leave our side and walk to school on her own through the streets of Newtown, and I could feel all the imagined threats coursing around in our brains and muscles like rogue particles, so, in the context of Evie’s many minor, though no less real, fears—dating back to her base, original fear of specks in the bath, on the ground or the wall, that would elicit blood-chilling screams from her as a toddler, a fear that developed into a phobia of bugs, specifically cockroaches and spiders—I thought it might work to talk about those smaller fears, but then I remembered how Evie had already found a way to process the bug fear, through her dreams, one recurring dream in particular that involved a bunch of spiders crawling up the hill of the laneway near our house toward her, to which she said, in a more recent iteration of the dream, No no no, no thanks, I’ve seen this dream too many times, and so she, in that moment of the dream, changed the swarm of spiders into a huge ball of pink and blue cotton candy, with chunks of black candy in it (which tasted the best), and the similarity of Evie’s dream to a recurring dream from my childhood, in which I found myself falling endlessly down a tree-lined hill, missing the trunks but crashing through webs full of spiders, struck me as uncanny, but what really struck me was not the clearly evident Freudian process of condensation in her dreams—like churning fragments of ice re-aligning the glacier of her anxieties—but Evie’s seeming ability to consciously alter her dreams, so in that moment in bed I asked her if she can do this to other dreams, because that’s called lucid dreaming and not many people can do that, and she said, Yes, I can, it’s kind of like pressing a bunch of buttons on a computer or like you’re telling your dog how to be on a leash, and then Evie recounted a dream in which she, a ginger cat with green eyes, was with her friend, a brown cat with blue eyes, and they were walking rooftops in the night meowing at each other in their special language (which they also do awake as humans) when they were suddenly separated by a giant space that came down between them, teleporting Evie the cat alone to the countryside, where she fell down a waterfall into a stream with a bunch of salamanders, which reminded her she needed food, but, to avoid waking up and, because she didn’t want to eat gross cat food and knew that a skulk of foxes was about to attack, she consciously chose to climb a papaya tree to escape and to eat papayas for 40 days in the treetops, and then Evie followed this dream with a description of another in which, at school, a large sushi train conjured itself high over the playground for the children and kookaburras to eat sushi from and watch over those playing a game below, during which if a special rock was thrown correctly it would start a disco party, but Evie threw the rock wrong and the ocean level rose really high, and at this point she felt so guilty, because she’d have to come clean to me about her causing sea rise, that she deliberately lowered the level of the ocean, and then the rock went in the right place and the disco just happened, and in my astonishment at this level of sleeping consciousness and self-awareness, I remembered that survival instincts come in many forms, and that one thing that apparently assists in lucid dreaming is practicing ‘prospective memory’, which is basically remembering to remember, or like, in other words, remembering to remember to get something from the shops or remembering to remember to turn out your socks before throwing them in the dirty laundry (something I frequently ask Evie to try to remember in waking life) can apparently help connect parts of your brain that need to line up for you to become conscious while dreaming, and I actually think writing poems is a bit like that—you rehearse poems in your head during the writing process, over and over, all sorts of fragments (of memory, event, feeling) get churned up into any one poem, the emotional arc of a poem slips in and out of your consciousness, and part of improving or perfecting a poem is remembering to remember the emotional arc so as to access the unconscious levels of what you’re writing about at the same time as finding language for all those levels while including real, everyday details, like socks—which are important—but then, with Evie still nuzzling my shoulder, I worried more specifically that the night-light I’d just installed in hers and Tilda’s room—so that we could finally close their bedroom door and turn off the big yellow light in the hallway to allow newborn River’s broken sleep and screams not to disturb Evie and Tilda in the neighbouring room—a night-light that shines revolving nebulae and bright green stars on the ceiling, might be triggering her fears, since the green stars are tiny specks, so I asked her how that fear was going, and she said, I’m not scared of specks anymore daddy, remember, and at that moment I did remember noticing this about a year and half earlier when we travelled to MONA in Tasmania to see one of its art exhibitions encompassing death and desire, where there was a series of prints by Tomás Saraceno reproducing cosmic dust from the NASA Cosmic Dust Catalog that Evie really liked, and in the interactive museum app there were various blurbs to accompany the artwork explaining how 40,000 tonnes of interplanetary dust fall to the surface of Earth every year, that a speck of cosmic material touches every person every day everywhere around the world, and that just as a speck of cosmic dust carries geologic history, the extent of the Capitalocene resonates through one mote of dust, expressing the tension between the micro and the macro as infinite timelines and disparate scales collapse into singular particles, and so, on the spot, I reconsidered Evie’s concerns about being kidnapped, and, finally grasping that her poetic mind can collapse the macro into the micro or expand the minute into the infinite, I asked her again about how her dream-play works, and she said, I can control my dreams but sometimes I pretend that I don’t know what’s going to happen, like in the Murder Game dream with my friend in the playground because it makes it more exciting—and here I thought perhaps that controlled excitement is similar to the dreadfully alive feeling when writing a poem and you both do and don’t know where it’s headed—and I said to Evie, Well this might be one way to fall back asleep tonight, maybe breathe deeply, focus on the details of the game in your dream and trust your instincts will find a way through any danger you’re feeling, and she said, Okay, I know daddy, and made her way back to her bunk bed to dream sweet lucid dreams about subverting kidnappers, and I closed her door knowing nebulous green stars on the ceiling would watch over her and Tilda, but I switched the big yellow light in the hallway back on, just in case, so I could see the dust descending on my own lack of lucidity.