On Friday night, I had the first proper nightmare that I
have had in quite some time.
In my dream I was at a carnival with friends in a familiar
place; we were riding on the back of a pick-up truck, we were all very happy
and we were singing and dancing. As we were going around the corner a white van,
with the brightest lights imaginable, drove straight towards us and for a split
second I made eye contact with the driver. I would recognise those eyes
anywhere. I remember them from my first ‘one off’ experience of sexual assault
when I was eight years old and they have appeared in many, many nightmares
since.
The van hit the pick-up truck and suddenly I was flying
through the air, all of my friends were gone and I was tumbling down a hill. As
I neared the bottom, the ground opened and I fell into a dark chamber. I was
dizzy and disorientated but as I came around I was shocked to see that I was
surrounded by rotting corpses. I knew that I had to escape so I ran towards a
beam of light but when I got there I realised that I was too large to fit
through the gap. I could see my friends dancing and laughing on the other side
but no matter how much I screamed none of them turned to look; maybe they
couldn’t hear me over the music or maybe they were having too much fun to care?
But for whatever reason, I was trapped and entirely alone.
I had fallen to the ground, scared and distraught, when I felt
this weight bare down on me and I felt cocooned by a firm but comforting grip.
I opened my eyes to discover that three of the corpses were on top of me; they
were holding me tightly and smiling. “It’s okay little one, you’re safe with
us,” one of them whispered. “We know what you have been through, we have all
been through the same and now we are safe. You are safe too, nobody will ever
find you down here.” “They don’t have to murder you in order to kill you,”
cooed one of the others. “They make you feel dead on the inside and even though
you still breathe they put out the fire that was once in your soul. And you never sleep. You can’t
live like that, my darling, and neither could we, and we ended our lives in
order to end the pain...” “You should do that too, my sweetness, you would feel
much better. What do you think?” “I d-d-don’t know,” I stuttered. “I want to
beat them. I don’t want to die. I want to show them that I am strong.” “No,”
the whisperer whispered. “It’ll never work,” the cooer cooed. The silent one
stayed silent. “I’m trying so hard to put it behind me. I am a strong person,”
I argued, suddenly growing in confidence. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like
that,” retorted a small child of six or seven, appearing from nowhere out of
the shadows. “You either kill yourself to be at one with us and the world, or
you stay trapped down here and starve to death. It’s your choice but should you
choose to try and survive we don’t make it easy for you.” She handed me a
scalpel. “Do it,” she hissed. I dragged the blade vertically down my arm; they
all cheered as my blood splattered the walls of the chamber.
What happened next was perhaps one of the most painful
things that I have ever seen. My blood began to transform into the bodies of
naked men and I could only stand and stare as each of the men moved towards a
corpse. “We are doing this for you,” the whisperer whispered. “I will go
through my abuse all over again so that you can be at one with us” and with
that one of the blood men threw her to the floor and raped her whilst I stood there
aghast. I didn’t want to witness this so I span around but wherever I moved a
different corpse was victim to a different act of sexual violence at the hands
of the men that were formed out of my blood.
Suddenly the walls of the chamber were caving in and all of
the blood men were coming towards me. They chanted as they moved and their
erections throbbed in time with their words. “Vagina”, “rectum”, “mouth”, they
were making their intentions clear. “But it won’t just be their flesh that
penetrates you,” whispered the whisperer. “Look above you,” cooed the cooer. And
as I looked up I saw an assortment of blood stained instruments; knives, broken
bottles, rusty nails, all just hanging there. “They will put them in all your orifices,”
the young girl said with a giggle, “just like my Daddy used to do to me.”
Thankfully, it was at this point that I jolted awake. My
sheets were soaked in cold sweat and my heart was hammering against my chest
and I could hardly breathe. It was 4.23am and needless to say, I didn’t get
another wink of sleep that night.
But these physiological symptoms aren’t new to me; I have
been experiencing similar nightmare since I was eight years old and each time
they happen I lose hours of sleep. I first tried sleeping pills when I was 18
years old but they sent me into such a deep sleep that my body was unable to
jerk awake and as a result I would have to relive the actual sexual abuse as
oppose to just the run up to it. The dreams were so real that I would often
struggle to decipher what was real and what was not and even to this day there
are some parts which I am not entirely sure about.
When I was younger, when I was being abused regularly, I
used to wake up having climbed inside my duvet cover and buttoned it up. When
my Mother came into my room to wake me for school in the morning, she would
laugh and tell me that I was cute. She didn’t realise that I had climbed inside
to make my abuser’s job harder, to try and make him go away. I would never have
dared to hide whilst I was awake but whilst I was asleep it was almost as
though my subconscious wanted to protect me. It never worked and, if he did
come in when I was hidden, he got angry and did sexual things that physically
hurt me too. I have never talked about that side of my abuse with anyone and
when I think about it I feel sick with shame.
I think, with time, I have come to accept that nights will
never be a peaceful time for me and perhaps that my bed will never feel like a
truly safe place. When things are really bad I avoid my bed like the plague and
back in first year I used to make a little den under my desk with blankets and
pillows and I would often stay there for days at a time. A lot of people use
sleep as a form of escapism but I can’t do that, what I have encountered is
with me all the time; it’s there when I wake up in the morning, things happen every
day that act as a reminder of my past, I lie and think about it all at night
and, even when I sleep, the thoughts are still there and present themselves as
nightmares.
Maybe if the therapy people ever get back to me, my issues
with sleep may very well be one of the first things I try to address.
