A not Really Terrifying Night Terror

Some evenings the dreams are really night terrors. Waking up in a sweat, the fight or flight mechanisms fully charged and ready to go. Friday night was one of those. The odd thing is, I have several recurring dreams that are pretty much straight out of a horror novel, these don't usually become night terrors. The night terrors are random, and sometimes innocuous seeming. Friday was one of those. There were strange noises coming from the back yard. It was pre dawn, just light enough to make out shapes moving among the potted plants, hiding behind the biggest ones. I stepped out to check out what was going on. There were two little kids, about 4 and 6 I would guess, dark hair and darker eyes. The older one was naming the plants in the pots and telling the younger one what they were named. The names were things like "elephant foot, you can eat that," and "Silver scale. Don't eat that," She grabbed a handful of Oleander leaves and said "We make tea from these." I had to interrupt.

"That would likely kill you if you drank it," I said. I then immediately knew, as one does sometimes in dreams, that these two had been abandoned and had been living up in our ivy bower for some time.

The dream slipped out of the normal sequential time frame and jumped around, ending in the scary part, the state insisted that my wife and I take care of the three children ("dreamshift:character count now = 3," there was now an 11 year old as well), because we took in feral cats, and like the cats, the children had been found on our property. Social Services wouldn't even try to find their mom or dad. The children somehow had a document that listed us as their guardians. It was reading the document that sent me into the sweats and caused me to awaken.