Dreams are a weird mix of things from the past and present, wrapped up as metaphors that are weapons against ugliness and that give truth…then…healing…if you can endure them.
The nocturnal performances
One thing I have learned is that many of my dreams are about my psyche trying to process something I either can’t remember or can’t handle consciously. I have learned that very early abuse experiences are often not remembered as a “movie narrative” but as uncomfortable body feelings and flashes of an image or metaphor.
I think there are those dreams that are not coincidental. I’ve had a lifetime of those. Instead, they put on a nocturnal drama that’s a riff on something from my life. The plots and characters are formed around unresolved issues, trapped emotions, and terrors from things done but not consciously remembered. And some of those “performances” have been stuck on replay for literally years, either trying to tell me something, release something…or process it.
There are many familiar ones that have been regular occurrences going back decades — to at least to my twenties. Maybe earlier. I can’t remember when they started, but do I remember what’s in them? Oh, my, yes. My journals are filled with their details. And many circle the same disturbing themes.
Most of the time when I’m having nightmares, I don’t think I wake my husband. But he has told me that there are nights he hears me tossing and turning, or muttering in my sleep. And occasionally I have yelled out. So, it is a fair thing to say that, for me, sleep is often not a respite from my traumas. Just a different theater for their performances.
The ghosts of memories
I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that more than one therapist has told me that my abuse started in my infancy. Times with no words and no conscious memories. But definitely a lot of body ones. And based on my body reactions to certain situations, I have no reason to doubt them.
Even if I did, there were my father’s comments in the therapist’s office the night I confronted him in front of my family during my pregnancy. He acknowledged his sexual arousal when bathing me as an infant. And I clearly remember him molesting me in the car when I was only three. So I have no reason to doubt that he started on me right in the beginning.
But even if I still tried to totally disregard all of those things, there are my nightmares. And, while certainly, some dreams are just odd or inscrutable and leave me asking, “Where did THAT come from?” there are others whose themes absolutely point to something.
The other thing I’ve noticed over the decades is that they have most definitely evolved….
The early years – replays of his abuse
For many years, the nightmares were constant replays of the abuse episodes. Saturated with helplessness and entrapment, each one forced me to relive all the episodes of my sexual abuse, and my sexual and emotional degradation. I was a victim of “nocturnal abuse replays.”
In them, I felt all the disgust. The sense of no escape. The not wanting his touch, and the guilt and self-hate because my body responded anyway. They carried all my despair of ever having anyone to love me. And my emotional exhaustion I felt from constantly being pursued by him, to the point that I didn’t want anyone.
Sometimes, they started with hope because in those dreams I had managed to get out of that house and had a place of my own. It was lovely…briefly.
But then something would always happen, usually something about money, that required me to give up my independence and go back home. In them, I would keep trying to save up so I could move back out, but it never seemed to happen. I would even try to find someone to date to start a relationship with, or try to reconnect with an old boyfriend, anyone that might “rescue me,” but it would always fail. I was stuck in that house, in his world, living his life. They always ended with no hope and no escape.
These weren’t the only nightmares, though. While these were clearly obvious in their origins – all those decades of clearly remembered abuse scenes and emotions – they were intermingled with less “literal” ones. Those were much darker, more symbolic, and represented, I think, the terrors from a younger psyche who didn’t understand what was happening, but definitely knew what it felt.
Variations on a theme
There was a phase of recurring nightmares that were set in my childhood home, in a sibling’s bedroom. I was a child, about 4 or 5. These were unusual in that they also involved other people besides myself – relatives… even my son, despite the fact that I was still a child. They might not make total sense, but still, the dreams had the same plot: Dad performing various sex acts on all of us. Sometimes they included glimpses of hiding under a bed. A “close-up view” of a child’s groin. Or being in the bedroom closet where “things happened.”
Then there were the dreams in the pediatrician’s office. “My son” or whomever, tells the doctor about where my father puts his penis, and a view of irritated skin. Meanwhile, my Mother alternates between denying any of this is possible and being angry that “he needs to do this.” Not angry that it was done to us, just that he did it, like it was a failure for her.
Moving toward theme and metaphor
During the 1990s, I was battling my father a number of times, begging him to get help. Eventually, when he wouldn’t, my only power was to let him know that if he ever touched any kids and I found out, I would make sure he went to jail. It was a terribly conflicted time. I loved him – the good side of him. I didn’t want to cause trouble. I was also still early in my own recovery and fragile. But I could not and would not risk our kids. He was an “addict” wanting his “fix.”
So around this time the nightmares became more “symbolic or metaphorical.” The scenes carried themes of struggle, abandonment, and betrayal, as well as being ignored, silenced, left in need, or alone and in danger.
In some, I was struggling mightily to carry out difficult physical tasks on a tight timeline with no help. In one, I was trying to get a group of us to an important doctor appointment, and I needed them with me. But I also had to push a heavy filing cabinet needed for the visit, first up a steep hill, and then up a staircase. It was almost impossible, and we were running late. But no matter how I begged for help, no one came, and we missed the appointment. In a variation of this, I was pedaling a large bike up a hill with others, only to have them walk away mid-incline, leaving me to do it all alone.
Abandonment and danger were rampant. In one, I was working “undercover” to gather evidence against someone dangerous, possibly murderous. I was part of a team, but they kept leaving me behind. Meanwhile, though we wore disguises, a woman with hard-edged eyes spotted me. She outed me to her accomplices, and I spent the rest of the nightmare running from them, up and down staircases, through buildings, basements…trying desperately to escape to safety, and catch up to my crew. Meanwhile, they had left me behind, reached safety, and watched as I struggled for my life.
The sense of betrayal – me betraying a loved one. This one was particularly haunting. I can only assume this reflected how conflicted I was in having to confront my father all the time. In the nightmare, I had to kill our pet hamster. I don’t know why, but it was something that just had to be done. I didn’t want to – I loved him. And he trusted me. I was in agony. I tried to do it quickly to spare him, but instead, he died slowly and in agony. All the while he was staring at me, and then at my hands, with those sad eyes, as if to say, “I trusted you and look what you did to me.” I was practically sick over this one when I woke up.
And finally, there were the dreams of unmet needs. In so many, I would be racing around trying to find bathrooms, but never could. They were either non-existent, busy, broken, a mess, or an illusion. And in others, I would be trying to call for help on the phone but was always thwarted. I either couldn’t dial the phone, couldn’t remember the number, or couldn’t get the phone to work. In the rare one where I could place a call, I couldn’t speak. My voice wouldn’t work.
Needless to say, I would almost always wake up in the middle of these nightmares, shaking, and not wanting to go back to sleep. But it was during the mid-90s that they took a much darker, violent turn.
Engulfing evil
This was the period of vague but all-engulfing sensations of darkness, evil, and violence. They took place in my childhood home, my grandparents’ apartment, or the home we lived in later in the country. Or a nondescript home that “resembled” my homes.
They involved weapons, darkness, and sensations of overwhelming evil, foreboding, and danger. And some literally contained dismembered bodies. I will not recount those.
The remaining dreams, though, were still totally unnerving. Though there were many slight variations, they were all of a similar theme, and went on for years. From my journals:
- The evil in the darkness: I was an adult, in my childhood home again. It was the middle of the night, and I was with my husband. We had seen a man going into our son’s room…the room I used to have. We had been sleeping where my parents’ bed used to be. Immediately, we raced to our son’s room, but I got separated from my husband. I could see absolutely nothing; the darkness was that thick. But I still tried to move forward toward that bedroom. However, before I could take another step, I became aware that an even darker, ominous black mass was blocking me. And it was moving toward me very fast and swelling in size as it zoomed toward me. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of being near a terrible, horrible evil. Suddenly the figure reached me, loomed up over me, and engulfed me…. Darkness is a living presence, an evil one for me, to this day.
- Dark, rainy abandoned streets: It was the middle of the night, and I was alone on a dark street. There was no light or only a small, distant one. In this dream, night after night, I was being chased by a man with a knife. Or an ax. Phallic? And it was usually raining. I would run for safety but never reached it… To this day, I dislike going anywhere on a dark, rainy night. It feels like death.
- The evil in the house: I am alone in the house, standing at the bottom of the stairs. I am afraid to go up to the next floor. There is a sense of pure evil up there; a foreboding that something terrible is happening up there. I can “see” an evil form going from room to room, axing people. I am not the victim or perpetrator, but a “camera” that can feel what the victims feel. Then I am downstairs, and when I open a door, there he is. I know he is the killer because I can see it in his eyes. I get away, but then, alone in a dark room, I suddenly hear a noise and feel a “presence” right behind me. There is breathing, and then the quiet whispering of my name. For a few moments, I can’t move. Then I grab an ornate, sharp letter opener and stab him to death. The next day, though, everyone else in the house is going on as if nothing happened. They aren’t the least bit concerned about what happened, nor are they concerned for me as the police interrogate me. They are just glad I “took care of it.” This one repeated many, many times.
A change begins
For my entire adulthood, these dreams and their variations have been my nighttime “companions” – malevolent and sinister versions of a “Late, Late TV movie show” stuck on replay.
In my forties, a new set of nightmares joined these. They were flooded with snakes…writhing… fanged… swelling vipers, growing in size from tiny to huge during the dream…and from a single one to thousands that would eventually overwhelm me. And often, they transformed from simple vipers to huge cobras spitting venom all over me.
But at the same time, unbeknownst to me, a transformation would be coming. Beginning in 2019, when I started the more intensive therapy work and the EMDR sessions, those nightmares would start to change. Dramatically.
For now, I will continue my story with the work I was doing at that point. It was the early stages of my finally facing all the things I’d never had time to face before. It was finally releasing all the trapped emotions and just “feeling” them.
So I’ll speak of those things next, as they are the last part of the “Nigredo” or “Dark Night of the Soul.” That work sets the stage for my progress toward healing in the future stages. And because the Cognitive Behavioral therapy work, the EMDR sessions, and the evolving nightmares are all intertwined, I’ll return to nightmares again and again.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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