I jerked upright at 4 AM one day recently and looked around the room wildly, seeing nothing.
But I heard two sets of deep breathing edging into snoring and recognized them, and sank back onto the pillow, drawing what might have been the first deep breath I’d had in days. Or, at least it was the the first deep breath since I’d slipped into my dreams.
Like many people, I don’t understand my dreams. By that, I mean I don’t understand what causes them or why they come in such vivid color and with such passionate, desperate fear, arousal, glee, horror, love and terror. I don’t understand why I can go without them for months, and then be assaulted by them nearly every night until I resist going to bed unless I am absolutely so exhausted that I sleep like the dead. I don’t understand why I can’t have the traditional dream of falling off the edge of a cliff, or jumping out of a plane, because those dreams seem innocuous against the things in my nightmares – the violent deaths of loved ones, erotic scenes so real that I wake in the throes of orgasm, joy so wonderfully grand that I think I might be flying off the ground as I run to meet someone who loves me desperately.
That morning, the dream was so far upon me that I woke nearly on the edge of an orgasm I couldn’t stop, and even as I jerked upward I could feel the bile in my throat as I prepared to vomit, in disgust of myself, even though it was only a dream.
Since that morning I’ve started – and deleted – several drafts about the content of my dream. I’ve not really talked to anyone about it. Chris wasn’t feeling well and left for work early, and while he knew I didn’t sleep well, he didn’t have time for the sort of conversation that would have been needed to process it. In the past, grief-filled dreams have clung to me for days, leaving me emotionally drained and obviously upset, practically forcing him to pay attention.
Truth be told, he’s probably forgotten about it or thinks I have forgotten about it, because I haven’t had a meltdown to tears. I haven’t grieved, clung to him, or written him tear-stained notes on Winnie-the-Pooh stationery – all things that have been known to happen in the past.
I haven’t done any of those things because I’m not feeling grief or anxiety. And, to be honest, I’m not sure what I would say to him if he did ask me to talk to him about it.
What I’m feeling is shame.
You see, that night in the dream*, I experienced something no woman wants to experience in its raw, non-consensual, violent intensity.
In the dream, I was raped.
I am sure, in the dream, that I knew my captor, though right now I cannot put a name to the villain. From the moment I woke, bitter betrayal clung to me. I was angry and hurt. My trust had been violated. In truth, it’s probably better I can’t remember who did it. I wouldn’t want to treat him differently, and I’m pretty sure I would even though it was only a dream. You see, it was someone close enough to me that I comfortably – without angst – got into a car with him. Family, scene friend, coworker – there are not many men, to be honest, that I would get into a car with alone these days. I have no reason to.
Without fail, I would not want what happened in the dream to happen to me. It hurt, both physically and mentally. I was terrified, and I spent the hours upon hours that I was confined and tormented reminding myself that sex is an animal act, not an intimate, emotional bond-forming behavior. It was a mantra of survival, something I wished to be true so that I would make it to the next day without imploding from the hopelessness and helplessness.
So why did I wake in shame? Because, in the end, the thing that woke me up was not the forced sex, the condition of a dry vagina fucked to bleeding, or the slap across my face that made my nose bleed until the blood pooled in my mouth. I woke up because, in the dream, my vagina and my ass were bleeding. But in my sleep, I was wet and aroused. My body betrayed my mind and my heart and me, and I’m ashamed of that, even though it was only a dream.
~
* I realize my dream is nothing compared to the real thing, but I’ve never experienced the real thing. Nor do I wish to. The dream was terrifying enough.
First of all, what a terrible experience! You have my sympathy. I can understand why you don’t want to go to sleep when you’re having one of these spells of bad (or even if not bad, uncomfortably vivid) dreams.
You probably know a lot more about this than I do (it seems like something you’d know about), but have you ever tried to learn lucid dreaming? The Wikipedia article on the subject led me to this article (which is only an abstract, but it gives the idea) http://content.karger.com/produktedb/produkte.asp?typ=fulltext&file=PPS2006075006389 . If you could manage to change the plot of the dream, have the police rush in and rescue you before you were raped, it seems like it would be a blessing.
Lucid dreaming is one of those things that I am too old-fashioned and grumpy to put much stock in, but my opinion isn’t what matters; apparently it’s a scientifically validated phenomenon.
Failing that — gee, I don’t have a second idea. Are there sleep aids that suppress dreaming or make it less likely?
In any case I hope your sleep experiences go back to normal soon.
I actually do know about lucid dreaming and can, sometimes, re-direct them or alter them, or force myself to wake up … but for me, in order to change the reality of the dream, I have to realize it’s a dream. If the timescale is changed (if I’m a child, or if I’m living at the South Pole for instance), or the reality is so fractured as to be clearly out of sync, I can escape or re-direct the dream. But when things in the dream are NORMAL … it’s as if I don’t realize I’m dreaming.
You’re not alone in this experience. The dream which I had some years ago but would now name, immediately, if someone asked me what the worst nightmare I’d ever had was, had a similar physiological effect on my sleeping body. That’s one of the reasons I remember it as being the worst dream ever – how sick and disgusting it is that I could be involuntarily aroused by something so horrific.
All I can say to you is what I’ve said to myself: it’s not uncommon, it’s not voluntary, it says nothing about our morals, our ethics, our values, our conscious fantasies, our preferred mode of play. We can’t help what turns us on any more than we can help what makes us laugh, or cry; it’s an involuntary physical reflex to stimuli. In waking life, some ideas which would affect our minds and hearts so much that we erect barriers against it, refuse to engage. In a dream we don’t have that control. It doesn’t make you a bad person, any more than a person who dreamed about commiting those acts and woke with an involuntary hard on is a bad person.
But you know this, I expect. I’m not sure I’d risk re-visiting the dream, myself, even to try to rewrite it; I don’t want to go anywhere near mine. I’ve just put it in a box marked “don’t think about too much”, and let time create some distance. It hasn’t recurred, and I haven’t had another one that bad since. Think of it like this: your subconscious is exploring the edges of things, and now it’s found an edge, it’ll retreat and not go there again. I hope so, anyway.
Pandora, I certainly agree with the sentiment that I’m not going to write about the gritty details! I’ve had 2 or 3 others in the past that still cling to my sub-conscious, as if they were still real, and I’ve explored them when I’ve felt strong enough… but they had to do with violence and death, and were not sexual. I’ve written about them, and to some extent conquered them. I had one recurring one for about 4 years early in marriage in which Chris dies. Eventually I had to sit down and dissect it, write it, and purge it because it was beginning to disrupt my daily life, as well as my relationship with Chris. In that, I am pretty sure that what I feared – beside the thing in the dream itself – was the loss of my relationship with him. I’ve wondered, in the past couple of days, if this rape nightmare represents my fear of losing what womanliness / sexual attraction I have as I age, as I think it’s pretty clear to me that over the years I’ve linked my self-confidence as a woman with sex.
s
First, I agree with Michael. I can actually do it, either waking myself up when I realize it’s a dream, or change things in the dream once I realize it. I don’t know how I learned to do it, but it’s definitely possible.
Second, even if you can change what happens sometimes after it starts, you can’t change what you dream about originally. You can’t tell yourself not to dream about something. Your brain is in charge when you’re asleep, and there’s no rhyme or reason in what happens. That’s why I can fly in my dreams. My problem is that I have too much knowledge of the reality of it, and in recent years it’s getting more and more difficult to get any real height when I do. Most times your mind is working things out, loss, fear, worry, but it takes it to extremes. I had a dream back in February that had me freaked out for weeks.
Don’t be ashamed of what happened. YOU didn’t have anything to do with it. It was one of the movies your brain created, and that night was a really scary one.
As a child and teenager, I had this recurring dream in which I lived in an underwater futuristic city. In that dream, I was always amazed that I didn’t need oxygen to breathe, and I thought it was the coolest thing – even as I was dreaming it. I’ve never flown in my dreams, but I think it would be so … freeing. It’s probably the same reason I fantasize about jumping out of airplanes, hot air ballooning and climbing bridges.
s
I’ve always said that if I had one superpower, it would be flying. I didn’t have the normal flying dreams as a kid. I was 18 before I ever had one, which I thought was strange. I had a recurring dream too, from the time I was about five until I was sixteen. It progressed as the years went along, so I know I was working things out in my head when it happened. Dreams are amazing things!
Serenity, I can no more know what your dream meant or where it came from in this sort of venue than you can, but I do know a few things about dream analysis, as I was trained and practiced as a Freudian Psychoanalyst for years, and these I will share.
What you dream about, the details, and what they mean or represent are simply not literal. The mind dreams in symbols and snippets of emotional and visual perceptions that come from the depths of our unconscious. It is sort of like reading a fairy tale about the 3 pigs, and understanding that the underlying meaning has nothing at all to do with pigs but with laziness and industry and preparing for the wolves of the world. As we wake our mind organizes the stuff of the dream in a way we can make conscious sense of…so as a ‘story’ if you will. It could be that the rape represented some very unrelated sort of violation and the flowing blood the flowing of tears. I am just giving you a made up example…dreams are complicated and the unconscious is unreasonable…simply beyond reason. Usually the real meaning ends up being far away from the original image or experience. The arousal you felt may not have had anything to do with the parts of the dream you do remember. You have ABOLUTELY NOTHING to feel shame about!
Your 50 minutes are up Ms. Everton. That will be a nickel. (Hey if Lucy gets a nickel…I figure I can charge too!
)
I really do think the rape really represents some other feared violation of me or my loved ones (losing my sexual identity, as I said above, or having something I love taken away from me, etc), although to be honest, rape is one of my deepest fears anyway. So while I recognize the reality of symbolism, the horror of the actual dream almost doubles the problem.
Anyway, your words are always worth more than a nickel. I’ve got a whole dollar with your name on it!
s
I mentioned to you on Twitter that I had read things that helped me come to grips with my own experiences but I can’t seem to locate anything particularly powerful right now. The most important thing I learned was that there is a physiological response to rape that includes arousal, even under extreme fear, that is suspected to be a protective mechanism. Becoming aroused and even reaching orgasm might feel shameful at first but it is quite possibly simply a body’s response to protect itself from physical harm of forceful entry.
Having lived through it, and come to grips with my own body’s seeming betrayal, I think I’ve been able to go on to explore further how the elements of fear trigger my sexual response. I now very much recognize that there is a part of me that wants to feel fear, relive it perhaps, but in a controlled manner where I know that ultimately I am safe.
Although yours was a dream, here’s a little something on rape fantasy that sort of says what I’m trying to say: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201012/the-rape-fantasy
Hugs!
I’ve never been one who fantasizes about true non-consensual rape. To be frank, the few times my mind has wandered there, my body has slammed down and off and that was the end of any sort of self-exploration of the idea. I’ve read – and watched depictions – of rape in other media and have had the same reaction of absolute disgust. I’ve even written of it, just barely, and managed to try and forget my own imagination after.
I see what you’re saying about the physiological response (and what Ley is saying about evolutionary adaption). I admit to finding seduction and semi-consensual scenes hotter than anything, and a part of that definitely comes from the release of not being responsible or in charge of what happens during the scene / fantasy / spanking. But a big part of the reason that it works is because I’m with someone I’ve trusted with my sexuality. Even in my fantasies where I am not myself, the girl I play has bonded strongly with a dominant partner … I’ve never been a sex-with-stranger type of person, or even a casual fuck person.
Thanks for the link
s
This seems almost too trivial to ask about, compared to the seriousness of your overall subject, but you wrote it, and didn’t explain it, and it puzzles me, so I’ll ask. You wrote “I heard two sets of deep breathing edging into snoring.” Two sets? Chris was one; who was the other? Probably not your own. Probably not The Princess, whose breathing I doubt you would describe as deep (plus, she has her own bedroom). The dog?
I check your blog every day, so for two weeks that phrase has been getting caught in my peripheral vision, so I’m asking.
And I hope that during those two weeks this dream has gone away, not come back, and nothing equally distressing has replaced it.
2 sets of deep breathing… Chris and the resident canine
. As for this dream, I haven’t had it in the last week.