Dreams of Angels and Demons

Carlos Schwabe's "Death and the Gravedigger"

I think I have mentioned a couple dreams here. It’s funny how they’ve always been my indicator that something is wrong.

There was one recurring dream I had when I was younger, while I may not have many concrete images of the life lived, I do remember the one dreamed.

I think I was five the first time I had the dream, in the dream I am around age five. Then it came back a couple more times by age seven, and then again when I was a pre-teen, enough times for me to remember.

I was asleep in bed when I get woken by a storm outside. I go to my parent’s room because I’m afraid and my mother is sound asleep. I peer through the door and see my father. He is sitting on the side of the bed and there is a glass of water and a bottle of red pills. He swallows one and suddenly horns sprout out of his head, a tail grows. He turns to me as his skin is becoming ruddy and his eyes glow. He sees me and begins to chase me. I scream and run from the doorway.

My mother, hearing my cries, wakes up. She opens up the drawer and takes out a jar of white pills. She swallows one and her hair turns white and grows out long, a white gown forms around her, she runs out to help.

I am outside running in the rain and it’s very damp. I’m slipping on the grass as my father chases me throwing out curses, flames shooting from his mouth. My mother begins to chase him, yelling for him to leave us alone. I run toward a pine tree and am running around it slipping and sliding with my father/demon behind me and my mother/angel behind him. Then I slip and fall and he towers over me – and I wake up sweating.

Like I said – the first time was at age five. The dynamics were already there. Although I don’t remember much about my father – I know from this dream he wasn’t someone I felt safe around. There were times when I loved nothing more than using his arm as a pillow (in fact, one of my scarier “I can’t believe I dreamed it” dreams involved me cutting of his arm to use as my pillow, the rest of him living at another house. It was bloody, but comfortable).

I was five. Five years old and my father is a demon my mother an angel. I have a scar under my lip. My mother always said it was from when I was age five and she and my father were in their bedroom. My brother and I were peering through the door, when my brother pushed me. My father came barreling out of the room and hit me – sending my tooth through my lip. This is my mother’s story of the scar; I have no memory of the real event. But parts of it make sense for the timing of the dream which I do remember.

Dreams have always been more real to me than my past, maybe that’s why I remember some of dreams so much more clearly than I do other events in my life. They are the way my mind worked through so many happenings, told me in ways I could understand what was going on in my life.

I wanted my mother to be my angel, but even in the dream, no matter how many times I dreamt it she never saved me. It’s also kind of interesting to me, looking back, that she had to take a pill to help me. This kind of goes with the running bi-polar theory. When she was medicated, she was normal. When she was on her pills, whatever they were (she never really told us) she was ‘our mother.’



When talking with my therapist about this we discussed the main points - how I saw my mother and father- which is quite obvious by the whole demon/angel imagery. However, the most interesting to her was that my mother never saved me. In all of my dreams, in all of my stories, no one saves me. I want her to, but in the end I save myself, be it by waking myself up or through getting on with my life and just standing up against all odds. There was no white knight for me, not even an angel.