Well, I’ve been up for 2 1/2 hours and I haven’t shaken my dreams out yet, so I guess I’d better write them down.
FYI: These are fairly typical of a “bad dream” for me. A real nightmare is a lot more urgent and a lot more frightening, ok?
The first dream went something like this:
I arrived at a house that my sister was house-sitting (not my real-life sister– the sleeping persona’s sister). She was living in the third floor of the house, and I came upstairs to hang our with her. I was new in town, but there was already this terrible sense that there was something Bad in the house.
My sister was all jaded about staying at this house– she was kind of taking advantage of the owners and family or something, though I didn’t understand why. After night fell, I understood.
This man– middle aged (played by Beau Bridges) came up the stairs. He had a cane, and he was kind of singing. The sister got all excited because now something was going to happen.
The “something” was to be the start of a series of systematic rapes that my dream-persona couldn’t get away from, and couldn’t reason with. The first night, she successfully fought him off so no penetration occurred.
On the second or third day, she tried to reason with him, explaining that she’d been raped when she was 17, so while this might be “just sex” to him, it was very traumatic for her. He basically said “that’s interesting” and went on. At one point, she was tied up so he’d be able to “access” her appropriately.
And each encounter was progressively shorter. The song he sang the first time, he warned, he’d only sing all the way through once.
As you might expect, this had some consequences. For one thing, the relationship with the sister became very combative, eventually resulting in an argument in which the sister basically told dream-me that if I’d been smart enough not to get caught with my drugs and almost go to jail, I wouldn’t be in this mess, would I?
Yes, there it is– that little voice in your head that says “It’s your fault that you were raped.” Ugh.
Another consequence was pregnancy, which was not a happy thing, but something I figured I could get rid of later– for the time being, I wasn’t exactly free to seek a medical solution, even though I was able to see a doctor about it (who indicated that there was a larger group of girls who were having this done, or who had had it done to them).
Anyway, Dream-me was more or less resigned to the situation. During the day, he was gone and we had the run of the house, which is the only reason, I suspect, that we didn’t fight more or I didn’t go insane.
Anyway, I was watching TV in the living room downstairs (the third-floor had its own living room, but I hated being up there because that’s where the rapes took place) when the family came home. A mom, dad, and at least two sons, one of whom was an older teenager who was actually kind of cute and kind of sweet.
Sister and I scrambled to hide all the evidence while they walked up the steps, and managed, although we had to pretend to be breaking one rule (no naked in the pool?) in order to cover the real crime.
Please don’t ask me why I was being so complicit in this– it was a dream.
I woke up shortly after that, got up, used the restroom, listened carefully to the things bumping around my house at night, and went back to sleep.
I hate it when a bad dream continues right where it left off after I go back to bed.
In this case, though, I shifted regularly between being a boy (in drag) and a girl, but that really didn’t play much of a role in the nightmare.
This second half of the nightmare is much fuzzier (3h 45 after waking up now), but I remember trying to communicate with the older son that this was happening, and having my sister stop me, every time. At one point, the fact that I was “actually” a boy was an issue– I think she might have threatened to expose me to the boy if I tried to tell him or something.
Eventually, and towards the end of this torment, I accused her of being jealous that this man (the rapist) was “done” with her, and that the teenaged son was actually being nice to me– that he liked me, instead of her– which was why she was continuing to torment me.
It was a little bit like the dynamic of an abusive family– the abuser is seen as just this force that can’t be stopped. Certainly in the dream, he was like that; nothing could reason with him. He wasn’t even angry– it was like a type of programming or “disconnect” in some ways. And we, the abused, turned on each other, not for strength, but for blame.
Gaaaah.
I ended up, furious, throwing her off of a short balcony onto an escalator below. It was a short fall, but she landed on the back of her neck and broke it. She was laying there, the escalator stairs just folding themselves underneath her as they went under her, staring up at the ceiling, not moving, her body at this terrible angle. I felt so horrible– I ran down and picked her up, supporting her head with my arm as I tried to rush her to help, all the time telling her she would be okay, not to move, etc. etc. etc. And she bled– even though there wasn’t any cut– I think it was coming out of her ear or something, but it was everywhere by the time I got her to the EMTs, and I knew she was going to die, and it would really be all my fault because I threw her off the balcony.
Oooog. I woke up just after that, with all these horrible dreams still in my memory. I hope– now that I’ve spilled them out, that they can just kind of get the hell out of my head. Because they kept niggling at me this morning to write them into a “real” story, but I know better. My dreams do not make good literature.
