F* ptsd

YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO READ THIS.



in my nightmare, i am my current age. my stepfather is here, in my house. i am alone with him, but i know he is now too old and senile to be a threat anymore. i am showering downstairs when he shockingly pulls open the shower curtain and starts to climb in with me. how did i not hear him open the bathroom door? he isn't nearly his current physical age, and he reacts to my shock and my insistence that he leave by brandishing his tiny erection and clear intentions, cackling his fucking abusive amused cackle. i somehow flee the bathroom and run upstairs while he continues showering and calling out to me to come back. i consider calling 911, knowing now as i didn't then that this is how to respond to his abusive actions. but i imagine them dismissing the threat, chalking the incident up to his senility and advanced age. still naked, i grab the chef's knife and go back down the stairs, where he is still showering in the closed bathroom, but decide that probably won't go well. "why hadn't i locked the door?" i excoriate myself, again piling guilt on myself that has always rightly belonged to him, just as he'd always taught me to do.

i know, i think, i'll just leave and figure it out from a safe place. i rush back into my bedroom and grab my jeans to pull onto my not-quite dry body. (how did it get that way? i hadn't toweled off. dream weirdness.) i have them not quite secured when i hear him approaching down the hallway. oh shit! i left the door open again! wtf was i thinking? (more self blaming). i rush to close and lock it, but before i can turn the lock he is turning the knob and pushing against the door, and i am still not as physically strong as him. i never was. he is overpowering me again, forcing the door open. i know what is coming next, no matter how much i resist.

this is when i woke up, bolting upright but not shouting out loud, somehow not waking my wife.

and it wasn't until i left my bedroom, awake, with no hope of returning back to sleep until my racing heart calms back down, that i realized my granddaughters are here. and it wasn't until just now that I realized it isn't a work day.



he can't hurt me anymore. this is just a dream. i am safe.

again i choose to forgive him, even though it isn't what i want to do and even though he doesn't deserve it for what he did to me over and over again. i pray that he will be well, and heal from his own brokenness, and live in God's love. it is still true that he doesn't understand his sin. and i will not pay the price that hating him will cost me. that isn't self-love, and i will not give up the freedom Jesus has won for me over him. yes, i hate what he did to me. but i refuse to hate him.

Lord, heal my mind, and please heal my step-father, too.

Another dream

I'm not sure what to make of them. I certainly know not to conclude that I'm gay. 

So far, I am not letting them lead me into fantasy, but trusting in God's revealed plan for my life.

Disturbing dream

The dream was graphic. I'm not including the details, but still, you should stop reading if you don't want to know this about me.

In it, I was visiting my uncle, who was still alive. In my dream, he shared the long-term obsession from which I've felt the Lord has been delivering me for the last month or so. In my dream, I shared with him where I think that obsession came from and why it was so hurtful to me.

At first he was patient with me, understanding that I didn't want to give in to this desire. But eventually he tempted me anyway. I resisted by saying that I would feel like a piece of defecatory material if I did. He replied that this was the purpose of it. Then I woke up.

The first thing I realized was that my uncle is still dead. I miss him so much, and he would never have done anything like this to me.

The second thing I remembered was to interpret dreams as if every element represents me in some way. That actually fit, especially the reminder at the end, which is very important for me to remember!

The third thing I remembered was to ask God to help me in my weakness.

(Added: The aftermath of this dream is that this temptation that had been so far removed from my thoughts for the last month has been in the forefront of my mind all day. Failure feels inevitable again.)

Nightmares

i was in the Georgia log house, in town for my stepfather's soon to be remarriage. He showed me how to silence the grandfather clock "in case you need to," as if expecting that there'd be a reason why i would, before taking off for his last night of freedom. During the night his first wife (who i never met irl; he was married once before my mom, i think) and her grown son (not the step-brother whom i know irl, though i was in my late twenties before they married and my thirties before mom or i knew he was my stepfather's son - which itself reveals a lot about my stepfather, right?) dropped by briefly to express their poor wishes for his future - something about rotting in misery; before they left they also shared in passing the news that he'd been arrested and was now in jail, but i didn't believe them. In the morning, his fiancée and her grown kids came by wondering where he was. i don't remember if i told them what i'd heard, but soon they were blasting YMCA from the sound system in the giant (non-existent irl) garage behind that house that i helped build (irl, and now wish i could bulldoze) and to which i fled in vain for refuge from the music. While it was playing, confirmation of his jailing somehow arrived, and as they were getting into cars and scoffing at me for my aversion to their party song, i interrupted their departure to explain why i hate it, but for some reason didn't tell them that it was their about-to-be family member who had started sexually abusing me there. i suppose it just seemed as if they deserved each other. (My interpretation of this dream: i guess i still have forgiveness work to do. i wonder where he is irl?)

There was a second dream that i don't remember now, but it was also disturbing when I woke from it during the night.

In the third nightmare we were hunting (for food, not for sport) with a guide. Somehow the etymology for "venison" in this dream came from using a "Venn diagram" of the preys' habitats. (Yes, i know that isn't what a Venn diagram is irl.) But there weren't deer in the area, just a bunch of giraffes. i hired a hunter to kill me, and he showed up at the house as i was cooking meat in the oven, but he didn't try to kill me. i burned my hand on the oven wall getting the food out, and observed that that wouldn't matter soon, with which he disagreed. i wondered when he would get on with what i'd payed him to do.

Strange dreams . . .

In the first dream that I remember from last night, my great aunt Emma was alive. The dream started with an accidental kick in my crotch somehow - I wonder if that was the dog IRL? We hadn't seen each other in decades, so she thought I might not recognize her, but although she looked like a woman in her nineties (okay, not 112, as she'd probably be right now) there was no mistaking her. I tried to get Teri to see if our granddaughter who shares her name could come over to meet her, but that wasn't going to work out.

In my second dream, we were trying to spruce up a school. There were many furnishings that had to be moved around in or removed from various classrooms. Then we had to plant grass seed so that it could take root in the dirt of some of those classrooms before they covered it with carpet. (What can I say: dreams don't always make sense.) As I was leaving, it was night time, and there was a football game going on. A player named Damien Rice, who in my dream was Ray Rice's younger brother, had won the game with a dazzling long play. I tried to congratulate him from my car after the game, but he didn't want that attention from someone of my skin color (again, this was just a dream), and especially resented that I tried to claim some sort of emotional investment in him as a result of my Ravens' fanship. His friends definitely had his back, as everyone convinced me to just leave him alone.

In my third dream, my mother-in-law had outlived her husband (the opposite of their order of passing IRL), and I was helping her prepare to move into an assisted living facility. She wanted to do this, but I was helping her because, in my dream, none of the other family members supported her in this decision. She offered me a couple of different furnishings from the house as we prepared for her move. I woke up with two memories of her: how much she'd despised me, but also how she'd never shown me that and that I only learned of it after she had passed away. 

I hate that the people in my life allowed this knowledge to get back to me, but it isn't as if I deserve to not live with it. 

Well, that was no fun . . .

Kept an eye on the weather radar last night for the early rain to pass, then started off for what I intended to be a four-mile run. But I just couldn't seem to keep running. First walking break happened after running up the first hill, then stopped for a while under a tree while it rained for a few minutes - guess I should have checked that radar more closely. Thereafter, it seems like I was able to run about a half mile at a time before needing to walk for a bit, for the remainder of what ended up being a 4.5 mile outing. As I was preparing to shower, I noticed I hadn't taken my meds yesterday morning, including my bp pill. I wonder if that might have affected my performance?

But the real fun started after I was in bed (ostensibly) for the night. In my dream, my wife's brother-in-law and I were on our way to Johnny Carson's house for a film screening. On the way, he observed that his wife tended to under dress for such occasions. We got there and he went in, but I hung out in the driveway for a minute. The band arrived and started to make their way in around me, as I apologized for not being able to get out of their way more effectively because of the cramp in my foot. My wife and sister-in-law soon arrived, having driven separately from us, and I hugged them both and observed to my SIL in particular that she looked very nice, contrary to her husband's concerns. They started to make their way in, but I wanted to wait until my cramp subsided. My wife's BIL came back out with a bottle of water. There was an African American woman going in, carrying a water bottle, so I took the bottle from my wife's BIL and drank about half of it while she looked on, after which she got on my case for taking her water. It seems that her empty water bottle was for some other purpose (in my dream she told me what it was, and it made sense, but I don't remember now). I apologized and explained my urgent need for hydration, and offered to go get her a new bottle of water. About this time, that foot cramp finally woke me up.

It was the first of about four wake-ups during the night from cramps. I'm not so sure about this triathlon, but I really want to do this, once.

Plot-shifting dream

In my dream, a high school friend posted on FB that she was having an ongoing affair with me, and that the sex was good despite being the only thing she'd ever want me for because of our political differences. (The thing is, this HS friend doesn't really exist; in my dream, she was also friends with another HS friend who actually does exist.) My wife saw this post, and was just as angry and hurt as you'd expect. I was apologetic, and at first in my dream I had only been intimate with her once, but at least had the sense not to offer that as a justification. As the dream evolved, I hadn't slept with her at all, and could prove this, but couldn't get my wife to believe the incontrovertible evidence. I awoke from my dream feeling very poorly about myself, as if the accusation had been true.

Wait . . .

Maybe the unsolvable puzzles represent my life . . .

Time to quit a game

I've been playing Flow Free, Bridges. But when I start seeing dots and pipe and unsolvable puzzles in my sleep, it's time to find another pastime.

Rebuking my first feeling upon waking

In the name of Jesus I renounce the lie that I am emotionally and psychically (for lack of a better word, since I don't mean it in its usual sense) alone and always will be.

I know this overpowering, consuming feeling is not truth. I also know that there are many ways this emotional dynamic can undo me.

In my dream, I was trying to move toward someone I love. I don't even know who it was, but in my dream they were the only person who mattered to me. They may have been the only other person in existence. But they were on a distant planet, at the other end of the galaxy, and I saw the scale of the miniscule progress that I had made, and I knew that in a million lifetimes I could never reach them, and I was filled with despair.

My thoughts and feelings upon drifting off last night were less hopeful than my last post, and perhaps formed the foundation for such a disturbing dream.

God (if you're here), help and save me.

Friend - and no, I'm not referring to the object of my dream, whomever that might have been; I'm only using the singular so that anyone who might read this will respond to this request as if you are the only one who will - if you're out there, please pray for me.

Hard work pays off

I was nearly fired last night in my dreams. A company president whom I've never seen (because he doesn't exist) was the one to outbrief me, and I insisted that he overcome his reluctance to tell me why I was being let go, because I needed to know so that I could avoid similar mistakes in my future employment. He explained that it was ultimately because I was too loud, which had especially disturbed him when he was on a phone call with a customer. I became even more insistent at that point that this was unjust. I pointed out that I'd mentioned my hearing loss as a disability on my hiring application (true in real life) and discussed it with my coworkers at the outset and when new people came on, as well (also true). I told him that I was pretty certain that it was illegal to fire me over this (though I'm not sure how this would actually play out in an at-will employment state, I'm pretty sure that handicap status is a protected category). We were approaching the CEO/owner at this point, who smiled with relief that I'd found the leverage she needed to keep me on as she apparently wanted (in reality, this entire scenario of my firing is completely unrealistic; the CEO and CTO, a married couple, run the place), and agreed with me afterward that I would have won quite a sum of money in court over the issue.

The timing of this dream is rather odd, as I haven't been loud at work - although I also can't hear low conversations very well - and especially as we just won a contract as a direct result of many long hours I put in preparing a proposal and our responses throughout the subsequent discussion period. It was very rewarding news, given the potentially life-saving implications of the device we're going to help make!

A different interpretation

In this modern era, I'm sure most people would interpret the dream from which I just awoke as proof of my bisexuality, which, they would insist, there's nothing wrong with. And since my wife was in this dream, too, along with this other couple, they'd say I wasn't even cheating on her (in my dream).

But in light of my recent reading, which I'm not tagging here as I don't want this post to appear in that thread, I instead see this as a chance to choose the identity with which I will identify. I turn away from that dream/fantasy, renounce it as the empty promise that my heart knows it is, and make my stand as my Father's son, to walk in the purity to which He calls me and in which He alone empowers me to live.

As often in four months as in 21 years

I remember using the VLSI design lab while working on my degree at WSU. The easiest access times for the computer were in the middle of the night, so I spent my share of early morning hours designing VLSI layouts, after which I would often see those color-coded squares in my dreams.

In my twenty-one years at Kodak, there were only two situations in which I can recall dreaming my work. One was when I was preparing weekly reports for the Prosper Press beta sites, analyzing controller log files and other resources to define and produce system metrics. The other was much earlier, during a site visit to Leeds in which we had to reconfigure a 3600 Printing System to work the way it would actually function rather than the way someone thought it would. (Setting the thing up to cue from downstream and compute the actual starting spot for print would only really work if the page size was consistent between jobs, and that wasn't true of the customer's production.)

Dreaming my work has happened twice already in my new job. I love this work, but to be dreaming evaluation notice responses three days after we finished with them is a little disconcerting; this follows the production in December of the proposal to which these responses pertain.

I hope we win this contract, but I also hope I don't have more dream material because of it!

A series of strange dreams

First of all, I should promise my choir director that, no, I'm not going to show up for midnight mass dressed in a towel this year, or any year!

Next I was going through a non-existence gas station out at the base (near where the Twin Base golf course is, actually) when I realized I wasn't authorized to be there, so I pulled forward without getting gas and was waived past the teller taking the money into a cul-de-sac where couples were parking and walking to the building for a dining out. (I never attended either a dining in or a dining out function, which mostly seemed to be for the officers.) I was trying not to be seen by a couple who recognized me because I didn't belong there.

Finally, I was buying a CD from a choir friend who is a songwriter, only in this dream it was her husband's CD. I was trying to flag her down from across the church to buy one from her, and finally did. When I played it, I heard her voice; it turned out that she did the vocals for it, but he wrote the songs and played on it.

Weird stuff. (Oh, I've spared you the mental image of the worst one, dear reader, as I'm sure whatever your mind comes up with on its own won't be as bad!)

Weird dream

Cousins in my dreams last night. I was driving around what was supposed to be Baltimore with one of my cousins, because we had tickets to the ball game. I wanted to see how the city looked following the riots, but we weren't close to where the damage was. We finally pulled into a playground and parked, and one of my cousin's friends who I know pulled up on a motorcycle. I threw my arm around his neck like we were best buddies and inquired carefully how he was doing, as his wife had recently died (in real life, he has been divorced for a couple years).  We made our way into a building which at first I thought was a back entrance to the stadium but turned out to be a brick apartment building. As we were walking down the stairs, my cousin's friend tried to squirm out of my grasp, and I let him go as we entered the apartment. There was my next younger cousin sitting with the guest of honor at a child's birthday party, perhaps one of her relatives but not one of mine. I greeted her with a hug, with which she didn't seem entirely comfortable. I then saw her sister standing on the other side of the child, but when I went to hug her I accidentally stepped on her toe, about which she gave me no end of grief during the brief remainder of my dream, from which I awoke when my alarm went off.

Musicals in my sleep

Conflict dream turns into song-and-dance production number in Manhattan, starring Billy Crystal and somebody singing, the end of each stanza "Ya got fifteen dollahs, and money" for whatever setting the verse ended in: for lunch, etc. At the end of the song, when the characters were taking leave it was, "Ya got fifteen dollahs . . and bus fare."

And it finished with a foot and leg cramp so I wouldn't forget it. (Neither my first nor my best unconscious composition.)

First up this morning, a weird dream

Out of the thunderstorms which kept us awake last night, the last of which seemed to pass right over the house:

It started in an old house in Maryland, where there was a vanity that had belonged to my mom, where she left some things for me. There was hair from my sister's and from my first haircuts, and a couple other childhood mementos. Then there was an envelope, and when I opened it I discovered that my biological father wasn't the stranger whose name and (very limited) history she'd made up, but was my uncle. This made my cousins my siblings!  Oh, there was something in that dream about telling this to my soon-to-be former son-in-law while he was in the bath in my grandparents' (now my aunt's) house, and an old pick-up truck with no brakes that my uncle had left for me. Very weird stuff.

Conforming (phase 2), Baptism and Temptation of Jesus - Three Degrees of the Love of God (step15), session 6

Okay, time for the repeat session on Jesus' temptation. (Mt. 4, 1-11)

I'm borrowing this initial idea from someone else here, and I don't remember who. But just as Jesus answers his temptations through his knowledge of truth based on Scripture, we also are strongest against our own temptations when we know who we are. Perhaps this was the reason why the Father spoke his pleasure from the cloud to Jesus. Of course he did so because it was true; God speaks only truth, and he speaks truth into existence. So when God likewise tells us that we are his beloved sons and daughters, it is a truth that he is speaking into being, one that strengthens us against the buffeting of Satan's temptation by reminding us of who we really are and long to be. The enemy brings his strongest temptations and accusations to bear against that, because our truly believing this truth about ourselves defeats him utterly. We have no desire for the illusions he offers us, of fulfillment through gluttony or power or even of escaping responsibility for our choices by offering them as a test of God, when we are at all certain of God's love for us and how fully it alone completes us and fills all our need.

I suppose this is why I am not obsessing over seeing someone receive Reconciliation last night who may be living in a way that will undermine the sacrament's efficacy in her life. It would be easy for me to say, "Yes, but . . . " and list my objections to that person's choices, but then I would take on the role of the Accuser, and I want no part of that. It is also tempting to believe my role is to make her see her errors, but that would be succumbing to the first tempation: to take on the role of God. Through the vivid dream of a friend in prison I have received a comforting command from God which I instead choose to apply: "Pray. Watch me work." His longing for his loved ones is always greater than our own, as is the pain he feels on our behalf which we are often unable to feel for ourselves when we make choices that separate us from God. I could judge that someone is living a lie by approaching one sacrament when they are violating another one, but that judgment has no place in the heart of one who has himself received unfathomable mercy. Rather, I long for others to know it, too, and I know there is a grace at work in each sacrament that exceeds the will of the human participant. We are incapable of knowing the full extent to which God is at work healing and transforming us each time we receive him in Eucharist, in Reconciliation and all the sacraments, as well as in prayer and in all the other ways he comes to us.

So my eyes filled with tears of hope and longing, which I am convinced were not fully my own, and I pray that those who were Reconciled last night would fully receive the grace available to them and be strengthened against the temptations in their own deserts.

Disturbing nightmare

I was with family - my wife, at least, but there may have been others - at some sort of event on a college campus.  My wife was playfully raising our youngest granddaughter upside-down above her head, and her short dress was flopping down to reveal that she wasn't wearing panties. I realized that she hadn't put any on after I'd changed her diaper that morning, and that it was my fault for not making sure that she had done so, so I agreed to take her back over to the dormitory so that she could don a pair.

When we got there, I was suddenly alone on the first floor, trying to find our room and realizing that it was on the second floor, so I began trying to find the stairwell door. Then I realized I didn't have my granddaughter anymore, and began to search for her. I went "back" downstairs, where there was a communal bathroom. I opened a stall door, and there was an older gentleman (well, he was probably not much older than my actual age, but I seemed younger in this dream) who was pulling up his pants. I apologized for disturbing him, but instead of leaving the bathroom I peered under the partition, where I saw a small leg sticking up from a large, square, tiled bath. I burst back into the stall, where I saw my granddaughter mostly submerged in the water in this square bath, and it was obvious that the man had raped her and attempted to drown her. I pulled her up out of the water by her leg and desperately began attempting to revive her while the old pervert laughed at my helplessness. While continuing to hug her and attempt to bring her around, I began to drown him, holding him under the water with my legs, determined to kill him for what he had done to her. Finally she began to respond to my efforts, at which point I awoke from my dream.

I am not even going to try to analyze this as I was taught to do, by assuming that every element of my dream represents me in some way. It is simply too disturbing. I did not sleep very well for the remainder of the night.

More on dreams (moron dreams?)

All you need do is peruse some of my other postings with this label to gain a general sense of what I think dreams are and aren't useful for. But just as sometimes some of our dreams - I am skeptical of the words "all" or even "most" here - can be analyzed to reveal some of our own unconscious feelings about ourselves, sometimes they can also uncover attitudes of which we might otherwise remain unaware.

So this morning's dream featured people I really know, or used to, and a situation which never happened. In real life, our circle of high school friends was more than a little casual when it came to dating one another. The fact that we'd previously dated someone's friend didn't keep us from dating them. My marriage is evidence of this; early in my high school sophomore year I "went with" my wife's best friend for a while. It never became very serious, though, and we "broke up" before very long. Soon my wife and I started going out, and our relationship would be on-again-off-again through high school. My best friend dated the same girl through most of our sophomore and junior years, though. She was a year ahead of us, and they broke up at the end of the year as she prepared to graduate. In the ensuing summer we had a group trip to Fort Miles, DE, which my best friend couldn't attend, though his ex did. My future wife and I were off-again, and I made a play for Sue, which she gently rebuffed with a kind suggestion that she might have been interested were circumstances different.  

In my dream, though, I was confessing to my wife in the present that we had in fact been together intimately back then. She asked why, and I explained that the only reason I could give her was the only one a teenaged boy would ever need: she was willing. In my dream, there was a recollection of our intercourse, or at least of the occasion and setting of it. 

But the thing that was really revelatory for me in this dream was the underlying attitudes about sexuality which I long-ago internalized.  I still carry around so much of society's approach even as I still strive to consciously reject it in favor of what I say that I believe to be a better and healthier way.