I’m getting used to the someone verbs something title format (when posts have titles) over at the Mark Spoils community, and I thought that fit this particular entry well.

I know that I’m supposed to forget my nightmares, but this one feels a little different. It’s like it’s pointing out a bunch of issues I haven’t resolved, so maybe I should listen to it. Or something. It certainly wasn’t one of the more pointless nightmares I’ve had, although it had its own pointlessness.

It was another one of those nightmares where I’d never escaped my parents. My nightmare nailed the layout of the oldest apartment we occupied that I remembered, which was distressing, and I was surrounded by stuffed animals that weren’t the Overherd, but bribes from my mother. There was a tornado approaching, and it blacked out the sky into inkiness.

Instead of heading into the incoming tornado, I decided to stay with my parents. Even said this to them, which doubtless pleased my father to no end.

At some point the tornado blew over, and I still didn’t run for the hills.

And then I woke up.

I think there are a couple of things about this nightmare that stand out:

1) The idea that I can’t escape my parents is a pervasive one, despite having escaped them. I keep returning in my nightmares, which makes sense in that it was how I lived my life was so long. These are the dreams of childhood for me: forever tainted. I have to live with that. I can never have good dreams about my formative years.

2) The nightmare did not actually give me a choice to leave. There was the fucking tornado, after all, and even after tornados are gone it’s not nice to flee outside where things are an absolute mess. For the longest time, I didn’t have a choice to leave, even though I wanted to. There were the practical ties (the first and foremost being a child) and then there were the bonds of family. The strangling bonds in my case. They’re hard to kick off, even when that family is abusive—doesn’t mean they’re right, of course, which many people seem to mistake them for.

3) When my dreams or nightmares give me the choice to leave, I FUCKING TAKE IT. If I’m old enough in the dream/nightmare and there’s not a tornado, I flee. So there’s hope in that.

I feel better talking this nightmare out. Now that I can look at it, it’s not a harbinger of personal development doom.

Although I really wish they would stop happening.