Night School

Kate Appleton, LPC, SEP, M.Ed.

“Please see my son. He’s having awful nightmares, only he’s awake. His eyes are open. Sometimes he can hear us and even speak, but what he sees is terrifying. He can’t find us. He can’t reach us.”

This was a mother’s desperate call. When I met the family, I listened carefully. The child, whom I will call Tao, described a nighttime world that was frightening and entirely real to him. I asked that a physician see him first, to rule out seizures or any other medical cause. At the same time, I invited the family to tend the field around him.

I asked them to make the house a sacred space. They lit a candle and sat together in stillness, calling in whatever loving presence they trusted, by whatever name they knew it. They cleansed the rooms with smoke and sent the fear and heaviness out through an open door. Then they marked the perimeter of the house with salt, drawing a clear boundary around the home.

After the clearing, I reminded them of something essential. Empty space has to be filled. Fear leaves a vacuum behind it, and without intention it finds its way back in. So they invited love in. They anointed Tao with frankincense and spoke words of safety aloud. They moved through the house to bless every doorway and window, every threshold where something might pass. And they laughed together, because laughter matters too. It lifts the nervous system and restores connection. It reminds the body that joy still lives here.

Then I met with Tao, and I told him about something I call night school. During the day, the body goes to school. At night, the body rests and the soul goes to night school, a place of learning and adventure, like Harry Potter, or like Link from his favorite game, Zelda. Link is a warrior, I told him, and so Tao could be one too. I told him he could carry things into night school for protection, a magic sword, a crystal, whatever he wanted to bring. From my collection he chose a stone, and together we filled it with words:

I am loved even when I get scared.

I am loved even when I think I am alone.

I am loved.

The stone would help him remember.

At home the family built bedtime rituals that were predictable and steady, so night school became something to prepare for instead of something to fear, a place of curiosity rather than dread. When Tao entered that in-between place, awake but not fully here, his mother could ask him to find his stone, to reach for his sword, to listen for his song. He might still be in a dark forest with shadows and monsters, but now he had anchors. He could hear his parents and feel his own body. Sometimes the laughter even came back.

The changes came gradually. We explored his fear through sand tray worlds and heroic stories, the kind that set good against evil and light against shadow, because the poles often need to be known before a child can find the neutral ground between them. We tracked sensations together. I would ask him what it felt like to face the dragon. His fists clenched and his heart began to pound. Then I would ask what changed when he escaped or won, and his breath would come back, soft and slow. Tao was learning to notice what his body did as his inner world shifted.

This child did not need to be pulled out of the night world. He needed to be accompanied within it, given protection and a measure of choice, so he could move through the fear without being rescued from it, a caring other beside him as witness. Night school did not disappear. In time it simply became navigable, and then less frightening.

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Some children do not need their experiences explained away. They need them translated into an adventure, and into an experience of connection. Through story and steady, loving presence, the nervous system learns that even in the dark, connection is possible. Fear does not shift when we erase the unknown. It shifts when we bring companionship and imagination into the dark with us. Night school is where the soul learns what the body cannot yet hold alone. And sometimes the greatest protection is not waking a child fully at all. It is helping him remember he is loved, even there.

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Katharine (Kate) Appleton is a somatic psychotherapist, relational consultant, educator and family legacy guide who weaves sacred presence, body-based wisdom, and relational healing into her work. Learn more at www.kate-appleton.com or email kate@kate-appleton.com.