January 15, 2004 - Recurring Release

For years and years I would dream that he came back into my life, that he wouldn't take no for an answer, and that we ended up together again, living together or even married. There was a part of me that just accepted this, even mysteriously liked it. But there was a part of me that had a sinking feeling of dread.

Years after I felt as if, emotionally, I was over the damage, in dreams I would relive this, again and again. Upon awakening, I would be hit with confusion. I thought I was over this by now. And yet, the dreams kept coming back.

It was, I thought, the sort of thing that might happen to someone who's had a traumatic experience. Whenever I had these dreams, they saddened me, evidence as they were that I was not quite healed.

Even after I went to counseling, the dreams didn't go away.

For me, recurrent dreams are a form of therapy, of healing. They go away for one of two reasons: you resolve the issue within the dream, or you resolve it in waking life. When you do one of these things, the dreams go away.

For example, I used to dream in high school about fumbling with my books at my locker, worrying about making the bus. These dreams stopped once I decided, within the dream, that I would just call my mom to pick me up.

So I kept wondering what I had to do to get these nightmares of Leechboy to go away. Then I had a breakthrough dream, late last year, where Leechboy came back into my life and I told him no, it wasn't going to happen. I was understandably exuberant the next day.

In last night's dream, Leechboy, who looked exactly as he does in real life, as he usually does in these dreams, had gotten married to a naive young blonde. They had two children together, which they treated dreadfully.

One of the children, a toddler, was not allowed to sit on the couch but was forced to sit on a metal grating in several inches of water in a porcelain basin. This same child was also punished by the woman by being turned into a piece of metal.

"How do you turn them back?" I asked.

"Oh, they turn back on their own."

I felt sad for the woman and her children, but relieved that it wasn't me.

Near the end of the dream, I said to myself, "This is what I'm going to write about tomorrow."

This dream seems to show progress in more than one way. First of all, it demonstrates that I do appear to be relieved of this cycle of nighttime horrors. The solution was to do in the dreamworld what I had, eight years ago, done in the waking world: give Leechboy his walking papers.

But the dream also demonstrates an ability to take an outside perspective on the situation. It doesn't take any stretch of the imagination to see, symbolically, that the young, naive blonde woman represents me when I first met Leechboy, and that their sad life together is a dramatization of what might have happened if we had stayed together.

He was always talking about our future life together. We would have two children. He would be a "house husband" who would stay home, cook, clean and take care of the kids, keeping the house pristine. I would be the bread winner. We would live in a remote woods somewhere, in a cabin, because he didn't like people.

I remember thinking, when we were together, that this view of the future didn't sound so good to me. But I always figured I could get him to compromise. By the time I began to realize that I couldn't, there were so many other problems with the relationship that the clear option was to leave.

And yes, I'm certain that if we'd stayed together and had children, those poor children would have been treated as objects, just as I was.

The fact that I'm able to see this from an outside perspective feels like a real breakthrough. The ability to stand outside of a situation is essential to healing, because it helps you figure out what happened and learn from it.

There's no way to know whether last night's dream signals a final end to the Leechboy dream saga. I've had recurring dreams together and felt I'd reached a solution, only to discover there was one more scene to play out yet. But I do think it's an incredibly positive sign.

When I woke up this morning to a world blanketed with fresh snow, it felt like a fresh start.

Moral:
Kick that loser out of your dreams, girl!