Lost and Trapped

Some people have recurring dreams - nightmares, really - that continue from night to night without any logical explanation. I've heard that it's the emotions behind them that are most meaningful, while other times people will come up with some mental block that the dream represents. Me, lucky soul that I am - I have recurring Dream Themes, two of them:

1. I am lost and I am searching for something that I can never find. Doesn't matter where I'm at, and I never know what it is exactly that I'm looking for. I've been lost in mazes, bookstores, libraries, old school buildings I once knew, department stores, yard sales, cornfields, houses I lived in or visited in my childhood - the only consistency in the location is that it seems to go on endlessly. All the while I'm wandering these places, I'm looking frantically for something important that I just have to find. I never find it. Never.

2. In the second dream scenario I'm trapped, and no matter what I do, I can't get out. These dreams are more consistent in that I'm always trapped in the past with one or the other of the same two people: My father or my ex-husband. (Hell, there's probably not much difference between the two) These are the nightmares, the ones hardest to develop any kind of perspective on because they almost physically hurt me, like all the nerves in my body are burning with a gas flame. I can't seem to cry over them, or to scream all my terror, or ever to express in what way it has the power to still hurt if it can't be touched. I froze out those feelings as solidly as I could a long time ago, but sometimes the steady fire seems to eat a hole somewhere in my head and the dream thoughts follow me even in daylight.

The first of these dreams I ever had was when I was only about six or seven years old. In this dream, I was trapped in my parents' bedroom with my father screaming at me. I remember the colors pink and red and the strange horror at the sight of his bare chest and the terrible screaming rage booming from where his face ought to be, but he had no face, and he had no head.

The other one I remember most vividly was from when I was a morose teen aged girl. I was trapped in the back seat of the car and my dad was driving it downhill and right into Lake Michigan. I was screaming in terror and jerking the door handles, but they were stuck. I screamed and pleaded with him to please stop, but he wouldn't, his face devoid of all emotion, and I was still pounding on doors and windows as the car crashed into the waters and I woke up. That dream always struck me as indicative of what it felt like to be a child of an alcoholic, trapped in a world I didn't understand and didn't want to stay in, but unable to leave of my own volition.

So what did I go and do? I "escaped" by marrying someone just as horrible, damn it all to hell. I chose that cage myself, stepped into it of my own free will, and then didn't realize that since it was of my own making, I actually had the power to free myself of it at any time. Instead, I fell into that same sick old pattern of unquestioning obedience for fear of anger and retribution, that blind helplessness of the little girl trapped inside who never grew up, never escaped from  the car, or from that awful dark-paneled bedroom that makes the walls of my current apartment so intolerable for me. Once again I am reminded of Alice Walker's assertion that "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

All my nightmares are variations on the same two themes. The worst of them are of a sexual nature where I'm physically trapped by someone's body, but that's just awful enough that even I really can't write about it, and that's saying a lot for me, the woman who tells all on the old blog to complete strangers. I wouldn't share these kinds of things at all - I swear I'm not really such an exhibitionist, or looking for any kind of pity or attention for this - except that I have this obstinate hope that I could somehow help someone else out of the cage. In my dreams still I am always trapped in that old trailer or that old neighborhood where I lived with my ex-husband for so many unhappy years, struggling to get out but thwarted at every turn. In last night's variation, I was running from door to door and pulling violently on all the knobs, repeatedly twisting them as hard as I could and yanking back on them without the least bit of give on the other end. My ex-husband was in the house, calm and cold, burning steadily. He didn't need to chase me or to scream at me for me to be intimidated and afraid, because my father had done all the groundwork for him. All he had to do was stand by silently and wait for me crumble and to give up. The most horrible thing about these dreams is the inevitableness of this outcome. I will give up, and he will have me, and there is nothing I can ever do about it.

So says the dream, but it lies.

I wake up and I remind myself that I freed myself of that old trap a long time ago, and I never have to go back. I try not to dwell on the words of the lawyer from back then, the one who told me that if I wanted full custody of my children again I should go back to my ex-husband and "play nice" for another year or two until I could gather up enough police reports of domestic violence to use against him in court. I remember the muscles tightening in the back of my neck in revulsion and thinking that the lawyer didn't understand what he was asking of me, to suggest I go back to that life, back to that sick parody of an intimate relationship where I was locked in powerless submission and slowly being erased from my own memory. The lawyer made me feel as if I had to perjure myself, to lie and choose my mortal soul over the lives of my children, and to this day I feel the weight of the guilt that comes from a mother who doesn't choose her children over her own soul, as any good mother should do. 

And so it seems I have to dream my way through those emotions over and over again, re-experiencing the powerlessness and the fear in nightly cycles until I figure out how to free myself of them. I try to do so by living my life well and free, by fighting for financial and emotional stability, to be happy and well-rounded despite the imperfection that is my life. I try to accept my non-traditional motherhood and to make the absolute best of it possible, but at the same time I have to struggle not to become so engrossed in that process that I lose my own identity again. I can no longer allow my ex-husband the power of being able to guilt me into doing more than I should or to stop taking care of my own needs. I have to keep telling myself that my children are happier and healthier when I am happy and healthy. This is a daily struggle, and when I lie down in the night I fight my demons all over again in my dreams.

How long until my soul gets it right?

Not Sleeping...

Putting the Dreams on Hold

Having been denied even an interview for the latest teaching job I was hoping they'd hire me for, I am back to applying for a chance to work any job immediately available.

I shall be forced to move away from this town and will have to seek work and shelter elsewhere.
I'll be leaving behind some fantastic friends - happens wherever I come and go.
Most of them will follow me closely on facebook for as long as that form of socialization is available.
It's nice to know that I'm doing something right. Must be, or people wouldn't remember me and want to encourage me like they do.
Meanwhile, I of course will keep right on writing and hoping and believing. In this sense, I never shelf the dreams. And this is because the alternative is hardly feasible.

Among My Favorite Quotes...

Forgive my brevity (the soul of wit).
My eyes are going to burn right out of their sockets
if I stare at the computer screen
one minute longer.

The Free Writing Becomes a Rough Draft

Well, I always did intend to come back and let you know how my free-writing session went. As I am procrastinating on a major project tonight, I thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about it.

I decided to write the three run-on sentenced pages of whatever first came to mind, and the first things to fall out went from affectionately reminiscing to something much darker.

I recalled how I had learned this writing technique from an English teacher I once had. Somehow this reminded me of how that teacher had once described to me what it was like to teach English in an Australian prison a few years back. I thought of how the At-Risk students whom I love statistically could go that route if they don't get my message and reclaim their lives from adversity. I thought of all their hope and promise, and I thought of how depressing my old English teacher had found the job at the prison. These were people who had messed up their lives far worse than what they were born to. Surprisingly, perhaps, many of them were charismatic, likable sorts. You might find yourself rooting for them to learn to read and then use that knowledge to make something of their lives, but few of them actually ever did. Plus, too, the very environment was not conducive to learning - cinder block walls in drab, dirty colors with guards posted everywhere and a strip search to look forward to upon entry... okay, so I made the strip search part up, but I know there was some sort of oppressive routine upon entering the building every morning, and I believe even leaving in the late afternoon.

Then my free-wheeling mind wandered to a stray line I had written in my journal that described an unwanted or uninspired orgasm as "feeling as if your body were wordlessly, involuntarily shuddering out tears of loss" -- to that asinine congressman who had claimed that rape victims can't be impregnated because their bodies "shut down" if the contact is unwanted. I can't believe a male person in this century would even say anything so ignorant. The body acts independently of the mind all the time - or maybe the other way around. People with PTSD know that all too well.

What I've ended up with is a very rough draft of a rather dark story about a triangle of sorts in which there is a lot of unspoken tension between character actions and desires, a teacher, a convict, and a woman, all of whom know one another but who have never all been in the same room together. I had kind of hoped that I would come up with something a little more pretty and inspiring than that for my first short story in a decade, but I have to assume that if it came out of me so easily that it needs to be out. Maybe I'll post it when I find time to actually write out a more fleshed-out draft, but that will have to wait until I've completed what I'm procrastinating on.

Back to the grindstone...

Writer's Block

I do a lot of essays for the blog - just thoughts that I've had that I want to share, or things on my mind that I feel I have to share. A friend challenged me to write a short story. It occurs to me, upon considerable thought, that I have not actually written anything good of that nature since I was in my twenties. It's all novels, essays, and the occasional poem if I really can't help myself. And so I sat down to write, and realized that I haven't written any short stories in years because I haven't thought up any new idea to write about. The novels are like obssessions that I have to act upon, the essays are a mission, and the poems are a compulsion. What are short stories made of?


Of course, I know all the tricks of the trade, all the things you do to break free of The Block and get something on the page. The one that always used to work for me was FreeWriting. I could write three pages of whatever pops into my head and then turn that into a story. But would it be a good story?

Let's find out...