“The Blanket Is Real”
Theory: infants need safety blankets to establish their own context for distinguishing the dream world from the waking world. They have not been alive long enough to have woken up enough times to tell one from another.
The blanket was the first ‘thing’ that was ‘real’…in any given situation with discomfort (needing a diaper change, hunger, etc), the blanket is a ‘go to device’ to begin the mechanism of putting things in order. The Blanket is the beginning of knowing what is real. Or at least a marker to separate one world (dream) from another (waking). “Inception” called the mechanism ‘the tell’ and/or ‘Totem.’
As consciousness expands, the monsters under the bed or in the closet or wherever become more of a threat. Children who saw the Tests of the Emergency Broadcast System and understood it grasped that the world might end at any given time, no matter what they said or did. However children react to being told there is no Santa is an indication of how they will adapt to paradigms being shattered by new discoveries in science later in life. 
Apocrypha, Shadow and Cold Light 
Beautiful writing, powerful story
Actually, the above comment was meant for the article entitled The Day That Was The Day.
Thank You – it’s one of those life events that ‘helped’ define who I was/was going to be. I’m glad you liked it. -J-