Bad Dream

"I am lying on my tummy - on top of what appears to be a massage table," the young woman explained to me.

She is telling me her dream. People do that a lot. Tell me their dreams. No - I am not a therapist.

"And I am in a hallway. The table is on wheels and someone has their hand on my back. It is a woman with short, dyed blond hair - I know now it is my sponsor," she continues.

She nods at me and raises her eyebrows at me as she says this - silently adding: you know - how you just know things like that in a dream?  People do that to me all the time, too - express a great deal of our conversation silently. They think I am telepathic. It is odd that they think that, but continue to tell some of their dreams to me verbally.  That is odd, don't you think?

"In front of me," Annie goes on, for that is her first name, Annie," are auditorium-style doors that are swung outward, open. Inside the auditorium is a packed, standing room only meeting."

She means an AA meeting, a step meeting she thinks.

"And I am talking to the whole group - and I am really choking up, like you do when you are in front of all these other alcoholics and addicts and you have been rambling and are starting to cry and you feel like a total dork, but do you stop - no way. And I am saying, next month I will have 20 years clean. I can hear people cheering and clapping - but it is not loud like it should be, it is a muted sound."

Annie looks up at me now, nailing me with her eyes. Which are dark blue, by the way.

"But I am realizing as the words are coming out of my mouth that my sobriety date is really 6 months away...and it will only be 19 years. I am in my dream and confused about this, so I lower my head and cry a little to cover because I cannot figure out if I am lying to this crowd or confused or...what?"

She looks at me expectantly. People really do that a lot to me, whether they are telling me their dream or asking me to pay for my items at the store - they look at me expectantly.  I have a way to handle this type of expectation, Annie's type that is: I shrug and nod all in one motion. It is silent lingo for "don't know, gotcha ya, go on..."

So she does:

"And then a circular stairway appears over my right shoulder - a steel wall moves circularly out of the way, revealing a spiral staircase. The part of the staircase that is level with my eyes, and downward, is dark and covered in a misty substance - but about 3 feet above eye level (remember I am lying down on my tummy still) the spiral staircase is clear and gets clearer and brighter as it goes up past the next level of the building...where the ceiling covers it again."

"And as I - as we all turn - to look there...a line of children...little girls...appears. They are sort of holding onto one another by their hands, some of them have their hands on the shoulder of the one in front of them, like they are protecting and encouraging one another. Some of them have their heads slightly bent down and are looking up shyly from that position. They look nervous. Afraid? Maybe, afraid. And they begin to tell their stories one at a time."

Annie looks at me and I see she is worried. This is where her dream worries her. This is the part that made her tell me her dream. She is reviewing it, rehearsing it - searching for the meaning and reeling out the unpleasantness of what she is about to tell me, all in one.  She is looking into my eyes to see if I knew this is what she dreamed.

People do that all the time to me. They think I know what they dreamed. Like Daniel in the Bible. The king had a disturbing dream and asked all his magicians to tell the meaning of it; they all said "tell me what you dreamed, I will tell you what it meant"...the king refuses. He wants to talk to the person who can both tell him what he dreamed and what it means.  That man was Daniel.

I am not Daniel.

I gaze back into Annie's eyes as completely emotionless, expressionless, me-less as I possibly can. She has to decide all this for herself.

"So..."she begins telling me the rest and as she does she doesn't so much look away as she looses focus of me. The dream memory is all she can see now...the line of little girls telling their stories.

"...they tell about being abused. They tell about being slapped in the face and punched and kicked - but no...they aren't. Not really. That is what we want them to be saying. I know this. All of us at that meeting want to hear it was only physical pain they suffered."

"What they are really saying is that they were molested. And how it tore their hearts out and they look so lost and sad and as they talk you see it happening to them one after the other..."

"And I want to wake up now. I want to know why I said 20 years when it was only 19 and I hate the darkness that their sing-song sadness has rolled out all around us. I notice the auditorium doors are shut now. I am alone in the hall. No one has their hand on my back and I am drawing upright and moving towards the stair, like the little girls want me to come up there so I can see better. And I say out loud in my dream - and I actually do roll over - put my back to my husband on purpose in reality, you know? I am not dreaming that I am rolling over, I actually do roll over and know it, but I am still asleep, too, and stuck on that spiral staircase. And the little blond girl in front of me whispers "we're all dead now, too". I absolutely hated that dream and that part of it. I hate scary dreams, don't you?"

She does not want my response so I make none.

"And that is when I wake up for real. I hated that dream."

Annie won't look at me. She isn't in my room telling me this anymore.

She is still asleep. She just says to me - "I hate this dream. It is not for me. I don't have to have this dream. Make it stop."

That I do. I make it stop.

I am a real person, just like you. I live in Connecticut. But that is my job. I bring dreams. 

I don't create them. I just bring them from where you keep them.

You call for them.
When you sleep - I hear you call for them, and I bring you your dream.

And like a the camera-man - when you call out "Cut" - I make it stop. I am a Dream-Bringer. There are several of us. We know who we are. It pays very well, as it should, because bringing people their dreams: good, bad and indifferent, is difficult and sometimes dangerous work.

And when it is time to wake up, this is what I say to you:  Wake up now. Time to wake up.

I have to go now. Annie is done with me for now.

Wake up now. Time to wake up.

Susan Whitlock
September 2, 2013