Many Years of Poems

I still feel all fucked up from that damn dream. I wish that Cliff would come home or Nicholas would come online so that I'd have somebody to talk to.

You might want to skip this one if you're easily triggered. TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual and physical abuse, odd racial issues, police abuse, mental illness.

I had this extremely bizarre dream that I just woke up from. I dreamt of my brothers, but in real life, I have three brothers; in the dream there were seven of them. And for some bizarre reason, we were all dark skinned; IRL, we all have fair, freckled Irish complexions. We didn't have African-type facial features or hair, just dark skin.

In the dream, my father was sexually abusing all of us, and he had a police officer friend in on it, and the officer told us kids that no one would believe us against him. To my knowledge, my brothers suffered physical abuse from our father, but not sexual abuse. I caught a few knocks from my dad, but most of the abuse from him was sexual. He never beat the hell out of me, and according to my oldest brother, he used to beat the hell out of my brothers on a semi-regular basis when they were kids.

I've had dreams before that my father "shared" me with his friends, except that he didn't really seem to have a lot of friends.

In this dream, for some odd reason, it was the late 1970s, when I was very young (I was born in 1976). But I still had my long hair, and I didn't have long hair IRL when I was little. (Nowadays, I can just barely sit on it.)

But I hit my father in the face with my braids, not caring that I would also hit myself with my hair, and somebody asked in a very Southern voice, "Who done messed with that baby?" ("that baby" being me)

My mother was in the dream too, and she was scared and trying to find something to hold on to, and had briefly gotten very religious.

There was a man who looked a bit like my uncle (mom's brother), whom I addressed as "Papa Lawson." No clue who he was. He was advising my brothers on career choices and taking care of my poor confused scared mom.

I'm so confused. I'm trying to figure out if I'm actually remembering something new, or if my brain is just scrambled. I have schizoaffective disorder, so I do have hallucinations and do lose touch with reality from time to time, so it doesn't make this any easier. Is this just some bizarre concoction of my mind, or did my father really share me with a police officer friend to scare me out of telling on him?

I am so tired right now. I would LOVE to sleep.

I went to bed around 11pm (it's now almost 3:30 am), and read quietly for about an hour, and then tried to sleep.

Around 2am I gave up on sleeping, because I was just lying there in bed with my mind racing, unable to relax enough to drift off.

Last night was like that but after about 30 minutes of mental restlessness, I got up and took some Nytol. I can't do that now because I have to take my boyfriend to work in a few hours (his shift starts at 6am), and after that I have to get a new alternator and battery and probably a couple of other things for my car, so my friends Tiff and Tony can (hopefully) help me get my car running again, so I can give my parents back the car they're letting me use for now. (They have three cars, so they can spare one, but they want it back as soon as possible.) I have to get the car parts in the morning, because this is Florida, and it will swiftly get far too hot to be screwing around with the inside of a car, so Tony wants to do it before the sun gets too high. And I don't blame him in the least.

I talked to my counselor about the doctor mess; she intends to speak to him and find out exactly what in hell he meant by the "just statutory rape" remark. I may have to see him one more time, though, even if I do find another doctor, because I only have meds for 13 more days, and I probably should not stop taking the meds.

It seems like the depression is a little better but it's like the depression has backed off and allowed the anxiety to take the spotlight.

I'm okay when I'm around other people, it seems. I spent Thursday in the company of others; it was my daughter's last day of school and they were dismissed at 11:30. I picked her up and we went out to lunch together and hung out for a while, then I had my counselor appointment, and then I went out to supper and met some friends. That was good; I got to talk to a couple of people whom I hadn't seen in a good while, and it was nice to catch up on life. I was okay, until I tried to lie down and quiet myself to go to bed.

Again, today, my boyfriend got paid, so we had to go get his paycheck and deposit it, and then we went out to eat with Tiff, and we saw "The Da Vinci Code" (which was pretty decent), and then had to do a few errands. And again, I was okay, until I tried to quiet down for the night.

When I try to go to bed, I start thinking about everything that is or could be wrong. I worry about Cliff spending so much money trying to take care of me. I worry about my daughter. I worry about my car. I worry that even if I'm coming out of the depression, it's only temporary, and I'll be back in that dark tunnel, inevitably. I worry about making my parents (and a few other people) angry with me over various things; I make mental lists of everything that needs to be done. I make lists of things that could go wrong, ways in which life could get even more screwed up than it already is. I have rogue thoughts of cutting myself and/or suicide.

I've always had vivid dreams; I dream in color and sound, which, as I understand it, is not particularly common. I dreamt last night of two men, neither of whom I actually knew. One seemed to be a composite of Cliff and several other men, either male friends or ex-boyfriends (hereafter referred to as Composite). The other was a complete stranger (and will be called Complete Stranger); he was fairly tall and dark-haired and had a moustache, but he did not look like anyone I've ever known, though I've known a fair few men who met that general description.

Composite was kind to me; he was clearly concerned about me, and wanted me sexually but on my terms. Complete Stranger was horrible; he touched me when I did not want to be touched, he threatened to rape me, and here's the worst bit.

In part of the dream, my daughter and I were in a bathroom, bathing (for reference, my daughter is 13). Now, this was no ordinary bathroom; the tub was seriously large enough for swimming. I've seen smaller swimming pools in public parks. It looked a little like the bathtub from the Prefects' Bathroom in the "Goblet of Fire" movie, but it was blue and the light was brighter.

Anyway, my daughter and I were bathing in this gargantuan, beautiful bathtub, full of comfortably warm water, and Complete Stranger (by this point in the dream, I'd already had a few run-ins with him) slips into the bathroom. He leers first at me, then at my daughter.

I move so that I am blocking his view of her, and tell him to go the fuck away. He replies something along the lines of "I don't have to go if I don't want to" and then makes a comment about how my daughter's figure is shaping up well, and a very unpleasant remark about how her breasts look like mine without the sagging, and another threatening remark along the lines of "if you won't give it to me, I'll take it from her."

At which point I stood up in the water and told him that if he laid so much as a fingertip on her, I'd tear his balls off with my fingernails and feed them to wild dogs while he watched, and someone heard me yell at him, and mercifully Composite and a couple other random people show up and make him leave us alone.

(Forgive my constant switching of verb tenses; I know it's poor grammar but I'm tired and stressed and not thinking all that clearly.)

Composite finds towels (big soft fluffy ones, too) and hands them to my daughter and me so that we can cover ourselves, and then leaves us to dry off. I comfort my daughter, who was a bit scared by Complete Stranger but somewhat amused by my threat to his genitalia. She calms, dries off, gets dressed, and goes off with a couple of friends her own age. Composite returns to a shaking me.

And I woke up, almost crying.

Composite's voice was rather like Reid's voice (Reid is an ex-boyfriend with whom I'm still on good terms; he was with me during my last go-round with psychiatrists and medications); Complete Stranger's voice was no one's I recognized, but it scared me. It was just such a weird, freaky dream, and SO vivid.

Sometimes I wish my dreams didn't stay with me the way they do; I still feel a little weird from a dream I had a few weeks ago, in which my parents told me I was no longer welcome in their home and not allowed to see my daughter (which I can't imagine them doing unless I did something really stupid that endangered my daughter). I've been sort of surprised every time I've spoken to them since then, because I half-expect them to be like they were in the dream, rather than the way they are in real life.

I really wish I could sleep. Sleep would be so nice. Sleep without dreams (or without weird scary dreams anyway) would be even better, but just sleep is all I want.