Nightmares

Nightmares

Hello and welcome back to Raped 25 Years. This is the time I invite you to take a short walk with me through my journey to heal from sexual abuse and sexual assault. Don’t forget to stay to the end in order to enjoy my gem of positivity.

The following nightmares are flashbacks of some of my traumatic experiences.

This is one of the nightmares I have. It always begins the same way. I am eight years old. It is nighttime and I am in bed. The bed is against the wall. I am asleep in the start of the dream. Mum and Dad are hosting friends and they are a few rooms away. The light is on in the room they are in, but there is no direct light in the bedroom.

I am sleeping on my tummy, and I am facing the wall. A slight sound wakes me. With my forearms under my chest, I slightly raise my chest so that I can turn my head towards the source of the noise. The dark man, who I will call Arthur, is in the doorway. All I can make out is his silhouette. He is smiling, because I can see his teeth. 

He moves quickly towards me in the bed. I scream, but it seems that nobody hears me. He gets to the bed and hits me to stop me screaming. I start to cry but only quietly so I don’t get hit again. He gets into the bed with me, and takes my knickers off. He then penetrates my vagina with his penis, and it hurts so much I cry out from the pain. I am fighting him to make him stop and go away. But he doesn’t pay any attention. In fact, he laughs. I am screaming again, but it makes no difference to the pain and hurt.

Another nightmare is that of the man I refer to as Alex, strangling me. Alex is on top of me in my bed. I start kicking and hitting him, because I’m scared. 

I fight so hard, Alex can’t calm me down. So he does the only thing he knows to make me quiet. His hands go around my throat, and then it’s not the nightmare I’m afraid of anymore. He keeps squeezing, but it has the opposite effect he was wanting. I fight harder, trying to break his grip. 

I try screaming, but it comes out as a choked gurgling. I know I can’t be heard. With that realisation, I fight like never before. I try to scratch his face, and then he does it.

Because he can’t calm me down or stop me fighting, he makes one last effort. He turns my face into the pillow to silence me forever.

And these days that’s when I wake up. I still feel his fingers around my throat, and I can’t stop coughing. I can feel the saliva backed up in my throat and I remember my face in the pillow. Even after making sure I’m safely alone in my bed and bedroom, my heart pounds like a jack hammer for another further hour or more. Sometimes I cry lately, because the nightmare is so real and the memory raw. That just makes the choking sensation worse, though.

This is why I don’t use a pillow at night. I use blankets and cushions to lay my head on. When I try to use a pillow, I end up pushing it away. I hate the sensation of my head sinking into it. 

Finally, there is the one of having disobeyed Alex by having a shower without him there to wash me. It starts with him slapping me around the face. Then I dodge him. That’s when he really goes nuts. It’s like he just lets go of his temper entirely. All of a sudden, there’s a hailstorm of blows coming down on my head, chest, back of the neck, and shoulders. One hit on the back of my neck is hard enough for me drop to my knees and hands.

He doesn’t stop. If anything, he gets a second wind. Then the kicking starts. I’m afraid he’ll kick my face, so I protect it with my forearms. Big mistake. His steel capped boots just go repeatedly and relentlessly into my gut and legs. I just repeat, “okay, okay. I promise. I won’t do again. I promise, I promise. Please stop, please stop. I’ll be good, I’ll be good. Alex stop.” Over and over I’m saying the same thing. 

When I wake up now, I’m crying. In fact, when I have that nightmare, I can still feel the pain in my body from the beating, even though it happened all those years ago. I can’t help it now and just cry when I wake up. In fact, I usually find now with any of these nightmares, I can’t 

Such  realistic repetitive nightmares in people who have survived sexual abuse and sexual assault are normal coping responses. It’s not enough that people like me, and you, survive the original traumas. We relive them time and again in sleep. It has been explained to me it’s our brain’s way of working through the horrors of the original insidious evils perpetrated. The good news is that eventually the brain does work through the atrocities. It takes time, and many sleepless nights, but it does happen. And if I will lose these nightmares in time, you will too.

And now for the gem of positivity. This time I have chosen a quote attributed to Jonas Salk:

“I have had dreams and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.”

I do have a dream, and that is to heal. And I truly believe my will to heal will eventually help me conquer my nightmares. I just have to keep holding onto that dream until I can make it a reality. And you can too.

What is your dream? I invite you leave a comment on what dream is helping you to hold on through your nightmares. Thank you for taking this short walk with me. And until next time, breathe - and believe.