Dreaming Is So Not Free

My wife and I have a pretty much daily ritual upon waking up where she recounts the events of her dreams from the night before. It is her way of easing into the reality that will be the rest of her day. It is also periodically the way I start my day with a Gordian knot of images to process that sometimes takes me until past lunch to digest. It's an odd bit of responsibility that I take, but sometimes it offers me insights into what is going on behind those pretty blue eyes.
Then there was the other night. Very late, or very early, depending on the perspective that is most useful, but we had all had a very busy and trying day. Sleep came abruptly for all of us, which was a nice change. My son was sawing logs in his room, my wife and I were in solid REM before midnight. That was about the time that I shifted slightly, and my elbow nudged my wife's shoulder.
To say that she woke with a start would be a vast understatement. To say that she screamed would be doing a disservice to the bloody murder that she yowled. Whatever notions I might have had about rolling over and going back to slumbertown were shot down immediately by the continued shrieks from the other side of the bed.
"What is it?" I begged her. To which her only reply was a breathless, "Oh my god. Oh my god." At this point, my son had arrived, trying to discern what sort of abuse must be taking place next door, let alone in his own home. "What is it," asked my son.
Finally, the three of us were coming back to full consciousness, and my wife was able to describe the horrible vision that had awakened her. It was one that I recognized as coming from Disney's Haunted Mansion, where the disembodied voice intones: “...And consider this dismaying observation: This chamber has no windows, and no doors... Which offers you this chilling challenge: to find a way out! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Of course, there's always my way...” That's when the lightning flashes and we see a body suspended in the rafters of the chamber above. Then she turned to me and gave the big reveal: "It was you."
That's when my son had the terrific idea of going to his room and getting the Native American dreamcatcher that we had hung in his room when he was a tiny baby. He placed it carefully at the window near my wife's side of the bed. We tried for a few more minutes to make sense of the trauma we had all just experienced, but in the end, we relaxed with the refrain of "just a bad dream." Our collective breath caught, we returned to our regularly scheduled sleeping positions, and proceeded to drift off into what was, for me, a solid, uninterrupted snooze. The alarm woke me for the first time in months. I was groggy but refreshed. I spoke only briefly to my wife about the interruption after midnight. I didn't want to hear any more details. I looked forward to the next morning that she would tell me about the horses that came to visit her apartment.