headcanon + meta series pt 1/? , shirley’s sensitivity
the very first scene opens with hugh offering comfort to a young, frightened nellie whom just had a nightmare. during this conversation, he says to her : “but kids dreams, they’re special; they’re like an ocean, and the big dreams can spill out sometimes.” of course, it’s supposed to be taken theoretically, but as we see with nellie’s “dreams” later having been spilling out an older version of herself, i think shirley, too, here was given a slight nod to. the immediate scene to follow is hugh checking up on the rest of the kids. he enters shirley’s room to what is to him her incoherently talking in her sleep, however, as viewers we hear her saying dancing in the red room... her SUBCONSCIOUS mind here is either spilling out, like hugh said, and either mirroring an intuition/premonition of nell’s bent neck lady---older nellie---dancing in hill house as we see later on ( or ) since we don’t know the real order of this scene and nothing is quite shown in chronological order, shirley could also perhaps be referring to theo dancing in the red room when she and nell attempted to get inside unbeknownst to the two girls. either way, shirl is aware of the red room and that it’s locked but is somewhere in the back of her mind registering that someone WILL BE or HAS BEEN dancing in the red room. then, when hugh makes an attempt to communicate with the sleeping shirley, she said a tiny spiel about pandas not liking macaroni. essentially, the random muttering he presumed. it was her CONSCIOUS mind though refusing to acknowledge the slumbers intuition. it’s important to note too that although hugh does not appear to put importance to shirley’s sleep talking, he doesn’t quite see nell’s hallucinations as anything but mere dreams at the time either, yet he mentioned both to olivia when he returned to the bedroom. as things play out, we learn that nellie’s “nightmare” was of importance because it is the first time that we are introduced to nell’s sensitivity, as liv called it. and i believe that it is also the first time we are shown shirley’s as well, just less directly than nell’s. now i know i just gave two different theories as to what dancing in the red room could mean BUT let me tell you how i believe that technically, yes, shirley does subconsciously register BOTH scenarios???? when we see the red door/room for the first time, we once again have shirley and nell---whom we’ve been inclined to take notice of both through dream and slumber, with the master key from mr dudley trying to get inside. take it back a scene to where shirley received the key; hugh specifically said “ mr dudley has something for you.” maybe he would have said it regardless of which child found them first but for shirley, she even said it herself: “ i want to see what’s in there too. ” it’s written point black there. she didn’t want to see much, but she wanted to see the red room. you could tell in the way she pound her fists on the door when the master key didn’t work. it’s a wonder how all that wanting didn’t help her to look a little bit closer. but it’s also as though shirl was supposed to be the one there whilst theodora was inside------ dancing in the red room... because whilst shirley was on the opposite side it was not theo’s dance studio, it was the red room. it was always the red room. and of course, shirley does see nell in the red room, absolutely. we aren’t given that knowledge through her sleep talking in the earlier scenes, however; we see it when she quite literally awakens saying nellie’s in the red room... they snuck shirley’s previous intuition in on us as a low key gestured guide to gear us up for her jolting up at 3:03 gasping alongside the other crain siblings with that big line---what we, at the time, see as her first on screen occurrence of actual sensitivity---when in reality, we just couldn’t know that it was theo dancing behind the red door that shirley and nell are working to get into because such information wasn’t even given to us yet. to capitalize on the foreshadowing this created for shirley being sensitively attached through sleep/premonition (??), shirley’s individual waking scene is then again shown in episode two as the opening scene, but this time we see kevin asking her what she said, and instead of muttering nonsense like as a child she just appeared to hit a mental block. her conscious mind still, even after all those years, so heavily guarded and unwilling to really see.