About a year ago, I found myself doing some light googling to investigate whether it was possible for my son to be having nightmares at such a young age. It turns out it was. So I wrote a post about the phenomenon (resurrected below), in which I speculated about what a year-and-a-half old baby could possibly be scared of. Obviously, we couldn’t get any info out of him, so those guesses were about as reliable as those heart-warming stories about Manti Te’o’s girlfriend.

Flash-forward to a year later. My son can now speak in actual sentences. Most of them are things like “don’t do that” and “that’s mine!” and “I don’t like chicken!”, and his understanding of language still outpaces his ability to articulate his thoughts, but if he starts dreaming again, I can at least ask him about it and see what happens. Except he may be beating me to it. Because lately, as I’ve been putting him down to bed, he’s been repeating the same phrase: The Weatherman.

I’m not actually sure that he’s been having nightmares – sometimes I’m convinced he wakes himself up just to fuck with us – but it’s definitely giving me the creeps. As I joked on Twitter: I’ve may have trusted meteorologists, but I’ve certainly never had a reason to fear them. Until now.

Maybe my son is just struggling to adjust to North Carolina’s climate and the fact that it’s sometimes 75 degrees in the middle of January. Maybe he’s quoting Bob Dylan lyrics. Or maybe he is saying something else besides “weatherman” and I just can’t understand him.

Or maybe Al Roker haunts his dreams.

Original Post: The Dream Police