“Deeper Magic”

A few weeks ago, J came out of his bedroom, looked me straight in the eye, and with a big smile announced, “I had a dream last night.”

In the thirteen years I’ve been his mother J has never once talked about dreams. In fact, I’ve wondered if autistic kids dream at all. When W was a toddler and having all sorts of dreams and nightmares (one time after watching the Wizard of Oz, W woke up crying about the flying monkeys she thought were in her room sitting on her dresser and was shocked when we turned on the lights and they weren’t there), J was consistently radio silent on what happened while he was slept.

“What was your dream about last night?” I asked skeptically. After thirteen years, why would he now be talking about dreams? Plus J’s spontaneous expressive language still isn’t the best. He has a hard enough time establishing small talk. Explaining his feelings beyond initial recognition rarely happens. Recalling a dream? That wasn’t going to happen.

He pressed his lips together, as if he was still remembering, then smiled even bigger. “About a lion. He died. But he came back to life again.”

I was shocked. And surprisingly knew exactly what he was talking about. The night before we had read the chapter “Deeper Magic” from the Lion the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The chapter where Lucy and Susan watch Aslan die on the Stone table and then Aslan comes back to life again. J was actually processing—actually participating in some way—in that pretend world.

I had been putting off J’s book report for a few weeks—just because reading comprehension is so hard for him. Finally, unable to procrastinate for much longer, I pulled The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe from the bookshelf. It’s a fantasy book, and after finishing The Thief of Always, and despite the massive amounts of characters (see here), he seemed to really enjoy it, even if I wasn’t sure he really understood all of it. I also picked it because I’d read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe book dozens of times when I was a kid. My sister and I had re-constructed the entire world of Narnia in our backyard and any open space we could find—wherever we could weave our own story lines into the pre-constructed ones.

But that’s a big difference between me and J. J doesn’t know how to pretend. He’s never pretended to be Luke Skywalker or Thomas the Train or Spiderman or anything. The only “other world” he dwells in, is that ever-elusive autistic one that I can’t access—the one where he carries around sticks and sets them on the floor a certain way, flicks a rubber band close to his eyes and see something I don’t see, or has relationships with numbers in ways I don’t understand. But as we started reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe J was making connections—we were connecting. J would pick up little things, like going to a magical world and how time was different between the magical world and the real world. “Just like the Thief of Always” he kept saying unprompted. For some reason, as we read this book, things were clicking. He was engaged. He actually wanted to read.

I haven’t heard any more “dream talk” from J since then. I’m not ready to give him “dream credit” yet. It’s like when he first started talking. After months and months of delays J would add vocabulary word by word but I still was skeptical. Even before his first official IEP, I had expectations for statistical frequency. I had to hear the word at least five times, within the week, consistently over a period of weeks before it would actually “count” to me.

Since our Narnia adventures, he’s become really, really, interested in reading. His class started a new book, The Outsiders, and one night we spent an entire hour and a half on the couch reading reading together. Without breaks, without getting off the couch to wander around and stim for a break. Fully engaged the whole time.

Right now, dreams or not, something has changed–shifted in J’s brain. Maybe with the lion dream wasn’t really at all. Maybe he had been processing the story all night long and it’s the first thing he thought of when he woke up in the morning. I’m not sure. I guess at this point it doesn’t really matter.

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