Oh Noes! It Was All Just a Dream (Well, Mostly)

Just a quick note before I start this post - things will be hectic for the next month, so postings may be sporadic. It's budget season at ye old job, which means the boss telling me to come in early and leave late yet still she wants me to go to school two nights a week to learn what I am doing. Oh, and total score, they are paying the $180 dollars that the textbook costs. I could do posts on how the US education system gouges the students with the price of these textbooks.

Anyway, let's see how short I can keep this today, as it's my lunchbreak. I just wanted to share an interesting dream.

See, after yesterday's post, I think stuff was more on my mind. Now, in the past, when stuff was dredged up I'd have these horrid nightmares. Last night, here was my dream:

I'm in my bed sleeping, in my current apartment when my mother comes and sits on the side of the bed and gently wakes me. I tell her I want to go to sleep, but she says this is important. So I groggily stare up at her.

"I'm sorry I put the pillow over your face," she tells me. "Really, it was wrong."

"Just let me go back to sleep," I say, rolling over and closing my eyes again.

"No, really, what I've done is wrong," she replies.

Now all I want to do in my dream is go back to sleep, so finally I say, "If you realize it's wrong, you should go get some help. You need help mom, more than I can give you."

I wake up (in my dream) to pounding on my door. It's my brother, and he wants to know where our mom is. Now, in real life my brother never lived on his own, he only left my mom's house to stay with his girlfriend then wife. When his girlfriend got pissed at him, he'd go back with my mom. He can't really do much on his own except kill people (hence his lifetime in the military) so needs someone to take advant- er- take care of him.

"What the f--- did you do with mom?" he asks me incredibly angry.

"I don't know," I reply wiping sleep from my eyes.

He barges into the house and looks around.

"I know she was staying with you, what did you do?"

I notice the message on my answering machine is blinking, so I listen to it. It's "Downtown Psychiatry Hospital" to alert me that my mom has checked herself in and after evaluation, they want to keep her in longer. She went to get help.

Now, at the same time my brother starts to freak out as he tells me that his blood test came back positive, "I'm BP too" he fumes at me, "you gonna have me committed?" Then his girlfriend comes and tells me that her blood test is also positive. I tell them I'm negative, but wonder if I am because I didn't even know there was a blood test for Bi-Polar disorder (note, in real life there isn't).

I just thought it was interesting how it was a wish-fulfillment dream in terms of my mother admitting she was wrong. I think that's the dream of every child abused by their parent's - that the mother and father stop hiding behind the rationalization of parental responsibility and admit that what they did was horribly wrong. We want the abusive parties to feel guilt, remorse, and shame for their actions. And while 10:1 that won't happen in real life, in dream life it can.

I think it also shows a shift - she wasn't overpowering. She invaded my space by being in my house, yes, but she left and got help, and I was able to tell her to do so. I wasn't afraid. Granted, my anxiety over having BP was still there (I'm 30 now, I was told if I did have it it would have come out in childhood because of the stress I was under, but 30 is basically the cut-off date for diagnosis, as it shows in the late teens and twenties mostly), but I handled it well, got them out of the house, and got back to sleep. The other thing of note - I didn't try to help her. I didn't take responsibility for her actions, but tried to tend to my own needs - something I really need to do more in life. It's hard to care for yourself when you are so used to caring for someone, or something else. I was thinking of that the other day while day-dreaming about getting another cat.

"I don't have anything to love," I said aloud wistfully.

"You have yourself," that voice inside me said. "Learn to love yourself more completely."

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.

In The Beginning - Flashbacks

I think it was 2004 when I began to realize something was up. My cat died. She was my life – my little Penny. Only eleven years old. It was hard, really hard. She had been my constant since the age of fifteen or so, since I returned from camp broken. Major hives had sent me to the Emergency Room three times while up there, finally they said I couldn’t go back. They were internal, I couldn’t breathe. And I returned to what was supposed to be my mom’s cat, who became the only member of the family I could trust.

Penny’s story, like all of the ones I have, is a long one. We battled cancer for two years and I watched helpless as tumour after tumour erupted across her skin. Her fur was falling out in little clumps across my apartment, often with decayed flesh still attached.

I expected grief when she passed. I expected sadness. I didn’t expect flashbacks. Especially not ones so vivid that in my sleep I was throwing myself into the wall, scratching at my skin, waking up with bruises and bloody arms and legs. The worst one I threw myself out of bed – hard – and landed on my stomach, face, and hands. It felt like I broke my nose.

First I went to a grief counselor that specialized in the human/animal bond. She was provided free by the veterinary office I had taken Penny too. It was supposed to be ‘group’ but I was the only one there. We talked about how Penny opened the world to me – she visited neighbors, I walked her on a lease, everyone responded positively to her. We also talked a bit about my homelife and that was when she suggested I go see a therapist to deal with that. She also told me to expect a lot of stuff to come back up as Penny was the gatekeeper – the last vestige of that life- and kept the demons at bay. With her gone, everything rushed through.

The one I remember the most, that wasn’t just the huge black shadow deeper than night with storm-cloud eyes, was a dream I had when I was maybe a freshman in highschool. I remember because it was one I tried to tell my mom in an effort to understand.

In the dream I am in the attic and my mother is coming after me. She’s just pale waxy skin and those grey-blue eyes of hers that when I was young envied as more beautiful than my hazel, and as I aged feared as they were just thunderclouds. She keeps coming after me and I’m screaming and screaming and the only thing I have on me is this whistle she had given my brother and I. It was a loud one on a mustard yellow lanyard and we were to blow it if we were ever being attacked – but they were taken away since the only place we used them was inside with her. So the whistle is in my hand as she’s coming after me so I just keep swinging it at her and finally it hits her in the forehead with an awful squishy thud and imbeds in there. I remember her falling, then the look as she is on the wooden floor, hands curled into the wood, her face turned up at me smiling with the whistle in her head and the skin buckled around it.

“But I wanted you dead!” I tried to explain the next day. “I was trying to kill you, but you wouldn’t die. I just remember wanting you dead so much!” I cried trying to understand how I could wish any mother dead. Mother’s are the givers of life, right?

“Are you having troubles at school?” she asked me. “Is someone picking on you?”

I looked up at her in complete disbelief. “The dream wasn’t about anyone at school,” I told her, “it was about you. Me trying to kill you.” I left out the beginning part – that it was self-defense, that she was trying to kill me and I was fighting to live. What bothered me more was that image of the whistle in her forehead, her irises staring up at me from the floor.

“Oh honey, it’s that girl Neetu isn’t it. Is she picking on you?”

For some reason, as all the flashbacks swarmed around and overpowered my senses, that was the image that remained, the one of her attacking me and that damned whistle. The conversation when I tried to tell her what happened and it was blown off – as so much was. At least, that’s the one I remember the most.

I also started breaking out again after Penny died. One cry would turn into splotches then a rash then hives and then the occasional visit to the doctor. I wasn’t getting sleep, I was jumpy, depressed – really depressed – and just walking in a daze. I ended up losing a good thirty pounds in those months (maybe year?) afterwards before I got a better handle on things.