Nightmare
Dreaming is just a kind of pareidolia, the reason we collectively saw a face on the surface of Mars when the Rover produced its first photograph, the reason we see people in the patterns of wood grain, animals in the clouds. The fabricated people of our dreams are shifting geometric shapes; their eyes grow larger and smaller, wider and asymmetrical; their teeth expand and recede. We don’t notice the world around us breathing because we’ve trained ourselves to overlook the subtle waves made by our own breath in waking life.
We don’t want to see the change, and that’s why we can look at someone, be talking to them in a dream, and realize mid-conversation, Wait, how did I get here? Or: this isn’t my mother; this is my child. Or: I am not in a human body; I am a monster.
More often than not, I am someone else in my dreams. I am from the start, or I transform into someone new, the metamorphosis a non-event. There’s something comforting to me about the unpredictability of that change, how I’m just along for the ride. I guess I’m curious about what will happen next. It’s like a movie with no plot that’s somehow tailored to my exact experiences and fears. To experience awe or wonder, sometimes lacking in my waking life, I just have to pay attention to the shapes my brain makes when I close my eyes.
I’ve always been able to recall my dreams in vivid detail. One of my friends confessed to me, after six years of friendship through middle and high school, that for a while she believed I must have been making up what I told her about my dreams because she didn’t believe anyone could remember as much as I had. Some I recall better than others, of course, but there are some that are so vivid, I can remember them after decades.
For example, I had this dream in the sixth grade that I still remember clearly.
Kevin Bacon is my dad, the actress who played the Huntress (from WB33, before it was the CW) is my mom, and I am the little boy from Stir of Echoes. We are having a funeral for our family bird, Zippy (which was my best friend’s pet parakeet in real life at the time), but instead of putting him in a tiny bird coffin, we put him in an empty aquarium. We all stand around the empty tank, mourning, when our house is attacked by blue aliens.
The house is in total chaos. I can’t find my parents. The king blue alien has taken his throne on our sofa, and all the other blue aliens bow to him. I hide behind the couch while I decide what to do next, but I worry that one of the aliens will open his eyes and see me, the way I sometimes open my eyes during a prayer circle.
I make a break for it down the hallway. The blue aliens have little turtle minions with acid-filled water guns. With no weapon to defend myself, I grab one of the turtles and start beating one turtle with the other. I run down the hallway, and my mom, the Huntress from WB33, pulls me into a safe room, as depicted in The Panic Room with Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart.
I turn to my mom and ask, “Wait, what about Dad?”
She tells me, “That isn’t your father.”
I don’t believe “turtles” symbolize something like, “In a past life, you were a turtle,” or “You are reluctant to come out of your shell.” I believe I saw a turtle in this dream because I had at one point seen a turtle, and my brain was cycling through what it remembered. That’s also why there were so many media references in my dream; I watched a lot of TV as a kid. It was my babysitter, my entertainer, and my escape.
When I had this dream at 11, I didn’t live with my mom and my dad. I lived with my mom, my uncle, my two cousins, and my grandmother. (My older sister lived with her dad for most of the year but stayed with us in the summertime.) I didn’t know who my dad was at all, so I suppose my subconscious thought Kevin Bacon was as good a stand-in as any. The Huntress’ lead actress as my mom is surprising because, as far as I can remember, I only saw one episode of that show, and it didn’t hold my interest. The image of my mother in someone else’s body is not so surprising, however, because in the dreams I have of her where she is in her own body, she brings me an unsolvable puzzle, or abandons me outright. To dream of her keeping me safe meant that I had to dream of someone else.
I attribute meaning to dreams, but not in the Biblical sense—not like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Just as curiosity compels me to reflect on my dreams, frame by frame, it also makes me wonder: What would internet dream interpreters have to say about this?
One source says that I dream of being someone else because I see my life from a different perspective. There’s some truth here: my therapist and I talk at length about dissociation, the way I escape my body by retreating into my mind at the slightest threat, even if that “threat” is just a hard emotion.
I have nightmares more often than not, but I have gotten good at redirecting the sequences of events. If anything is happening that feels too unsettling, I can say, This isn’t happening to me. This is a movie. I can watch my perspective shift, push back, so that it’s all on a screen. Being in another body in my dreams is just another type of self-preservation.
A male friend and I drive down a secluded road, only trees and fields surrounding it. In the ditch nearby stands a figure. It isn’t quite night, but still it is hard to make out the figure until we drive beside it. From the passenger seat, I can see that the figure wears a cloak, and inside his cloak, his face is many-eyed and -tentacled.
He sees me.
I know then that he will follow us, and I am afraid of what he might do.
My friend and I arrive at our destination: a house in the middle of nowhere, still under construction. There are piles of wooden planks nearby. The other-worldly creature, having followed us after all, eats my friend, cleanly and quickly, and then turns toward me.
I climb onto the wooden planks, scrambling too slowly to get away. I know it will be upon me soon.
I stop and turn and absorb the creature. Or, rather, I let it absorb me, in essence, not in body. I possess the creature. I become it. I know, at least now, I will be safe.
But I am terrified of what I might do to survive.
For the past 10 years or so, I have dreamt about betraying myself or the people I love, about secretly being what other people should be afraid of.
When my ex-girlfriend and I were together, I often dreamt that I cheated on her. I worried that she would leave me because of it, because of something that I had done in the past, before I could control myself. When I was vegan, I had regular dreams about eating meat. I have been sober since March 2019, and I have frequent dreams about drinking.
In a similar vein, I have dreamt about having a baby, or remembering that I have a baby. The baby isn’t always the same, nor the setting or the horrors. Sometimes when I find the baby, he’s atrophied, emaciated. He’s discolored. Sometimes the baby is my dog, and I’ve accidentally let him out and he’s been hit by a car, and my mother is there, and she’s telling me, “I’m so sorry, he’s gone,” and it’s my fault. It’s my fault.
I am on the highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I park my car in the middle lane, get out and start walking. Then traffic suddenly starts to pick up. I know that my parked car is causing congestion behind me, but I just think, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that now. I’m too far away.”
A coworker starts calling my name. She is running along the highway, about 10 feet from me, screaming, “Your baby’s still in the car!”
At first, I am confused. “My baby?” But I don’t have a baby. Then I remember that my sister Kayleigh had asked me to watch my nephew the night before, but our timelines didn’t intersect, so she had to leave him in my car at 2 p.m. that day. I had completely forgotten.
He has been in the car for hours and hours. How could I have forgotten him? What is wrong with me?
“Oh, god,” I cry, “MY BABY IS STILL IN THE CAR!”
I run back to the car, worrying that my nephew is dead. I pull Evan out of his carseat, his blonde hair, so like my sisters, matted with sweat, his skin sticky and sagging. He is closer in appearance to a melted babydoll than to a real baby. I feel horrible. I don’t know if there is anything I can do to help him or if he will be disfigured for the rest of his life. I think, “What was Kayleigh thinking? Why would she ever leave a baby in a car in the Texas heat? Kayleigh would never do that, would she?”
According to the internet, where all things are true, dreaming about neglecting a baby is a symbol of your own needs being neglected. The baby in your dream is your inner child. In a way, this makes sense to me: When I dissociate, I often neglect my needs, whether they originated in childhood or not. I have forgotten to shower or brush my teeth for days at a time. I have re-worn dirty clothes to work because I forgot for weeks to do the laundry. I have eaten cereal or frozen pizza for all three daily meals because I couldn’t be bothered to cook for myself. I am usually too busy watching other people’s bodies on screen or reading about them in a book to remember that I have one myself, that it grows hungry, that it aches.
Dissociation starts in one place but spreads like a virus. If I am overlooking my own needs, then it stands to reason that I would overlook the needs of others. At least, that is my fear, the one that haunts me each night.
When I had the dream about leaving my nephew in a hot car on the highway, it was 2018, and I didn’t know then that I would become his temporary guardian in 2020. That year, he would turn twelve, and his little brother, whom I had never met, would be four, and I would hollow my savings and go into debt to take them in.
I felt ready to be my nephews’ guardian. I thought maybe my years of caring for my mother and leaving her to care for myself had prepared me for exactly this task. Maybe I could do it better. Maybe I could break a cycle.
Growing up, my mom had trouble staying awake. Not only does she have sleep apnea, but she also has Bipolar Disorder, so motivating herself to stay conscious during depressive episodes was a losing battle before she started her medication. She wasn’t diagnosed with the latter condition until I was in my mid-twenties, so there are entire seasons of my young life where I do not remember her being awake. I’d come home from school to find her passed out on the couch, a swollen leg dangling off the side, her mouth wide and gurgling, her brow crinkled as if in deep thought.
Her bosses often found her asleep at work, so she would get fired and come to me with her problems. She’d tell me about our looming evictions, leave me with her feelings of guilt, her shame. She never asked me to fix them, not directly, but at a very young age, I learned that my mother could not protect me from the dangers of the world. She couldn’t protect herself. From a young age, I understood that if I didn’t take care of myself, my home, my family, no one would.
I did research. I told my mom which jobs were hiring, how much they paid an hour. Through the pseudo-social experiments I conducted at school with my teachers and classmates, I tried to teach her how to maintain professional relationships. I made suggestions, and she did not take them.
I am the mommy, she’d say. You are the child.
I resented her for the position she put me in, for parentifying me and yanking away my authority. I didn’t want to care about her. I worked nights and stayed up late to read while she slept. On weekends and school breaks, I slept from five in the morning to two in the afternoon to avoid her. I wanted to save money, so I could leave, and then she wouldn’t be my problem anymore.
But my sister, four years older, moved in with our mom and me in 2009, just after I graduated high school. She was trying to leave her abusive husband, and she brought her baby son with her. My sister needed someone to babysit him while she worked. (She was trying to save up to leave too.)
I was already so sick of parenting my mother; I didn’t want to care for this baby. I was so angry at my nephew. For existing. For his proximity to me. For needing so much. I babysat him but only reluctantly. I felt disgusted when he cried.
At 19, I finally had enough money saved to move out. To leave that little baby who needed support. My sister, with only my mom to help her, decided it was better to move back in with her husband after all.
I didn’t see her or my nephew for 10 years.
My sister is an astronaut; that is the reason I have her kids. She calls from space every day. She is connected to the space station by a tether. We are all inside it, and people are lined up to ride the ride, to dangle precariously in space for fun. I am too afraid to have my youngest nephew ride it. He has no regard for his own safety, often launching himself off of the tallest pieces of furniture he can climb. (He is always covered in bruises when the case worker visits.)
I turn to find him, to press him against me, but he is missing. I run around the space station screaming for him, but hardly anyone pays attention. I find him inside a vent, connected to the ride, sweaty and overheated. If I hadn’t found him he would have suffocated. He can’t understand why I am crying.
I am so fatigued and worried that there is something wrong with me—why can’t I stay awake? Do I have Covid? I get in the car with the kids and forget to buckle Caleb into his booster seat. By the time I realize I need to pull over and buckle him in, the booster seat is gone and I have no idea where it is. Who would take it out? Was it me? I scream, “Where is it? Where is it?” but no one answers.
When you’re a new parent, it’s normal to have stress-dreams about caring for children, but having dreams where no one is listening to you can indicate that you are feeling devalued, that you fear your needs are not important.
This interpretation is hard for me.
During my six-month kinship with the children, I felt, every single day, that I couldn’t take care of their needs. I was aware of my own needs each day, but being so aware of them made me feel selfish. My intellectual mind could understand what they needed more from me: patience, understanding, compassion. Unconditional love.
And each day, I fell short.
I was suddenly a single parent of two children at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The children were so traumatized. During the first three months of lockdown, they lived in a group home, where more abuse took place.
I read so many parenting books, and I had reading time with them at night, and I established a daily routine, and both kids were going to at least two therapists—individual, group, play and behavioral—but they were still so miserable. While parenting my mom as a kid, I learned that other people’s feelings were my responsibility, that if I wasn’t making them happy, I wasn’t helping them.
And the children were so unhappy.
Evan often called me from the nurse’s office to be picked up early, his symptoms consistent with panic attacks. He took long naps after school but then came out shortly before dinner time, starved for attention. He told me the same fart jokes over and over again, aching for my approval, but I was too tired to laugh.
Caleb told me that he hit me and threw things and wouldn’t listen because I wasn’t his mommy.
Once, during reading time, I pulled out B Is for Breathe: The ABCs of Coping with Fussy and Frustrating Feelings, and Caleb groaned, “Not that one again.”
“OK,” I laughed, “we don’t have to read this one again if you can tell me five things you can do to calm down when you’re upset.”
“Well, we don’t hit,” he said quickly.
“Right.” I nodded, holding up a finger, ready to count as he listed points aloud.
“We don’t hit Brother.”
“Right,” I said, keeping just one finger up.
“And we don’t hit the dog. And we don’t hit Mommy…” By this point, Kayleigh was allowed to visit for an hour once a week, but the kids’ father, now in prison, was not. “But I don’t hit Mommy,” Caleb said, surprised at himself, “because I love her.”
I saw the connection he was making, but before I could say anything, he shifted his startlingly blue eyes to me, and with calm consideration, he added, “But I don’t love you.”
I understood that children should be with their mothers. It’s something primal. It’s a guttural need that surpasses language.
But when I was 11, I dreamed of having a different mommy. I still dream of being someone else, what the opportunities of biological luck might have afforded me in another universe. So the guttural, raw part of me, the part that sees shapes behind my eyes and interprets them, cannot understand why I wasn’t enough.
Aliens have kidnapped my mom and me, and we aren’t sure what they want with us. The two of us, along with a group of other captive strangers, are strapped to chairs and can’t move.
When we arrive at a giant institution, I realize, “Wait, where is our baby?” It is my mom’s baby (so my sister, but I don’t think about her like that). I feel responsible for the baby but powerless to do anything. When we are alone, my mom says, “Don’t worry, I brought her with us.” She pulls out a locket and starts ripping it up. It tears like cloth, and the little cloth pieces float in the air until she is done, and then they assemble into the baby, alive and happy. Mom brought her out to show me she was safe, but to keep her safe, we have to return her to her prior form, and the baby doesn’t want to change again. Mom has to be firm and almost mean to her to make her go back into the locket. My heart aches because the baby can’t understand that this is for her own good.
A few days later my mom is sitting in a chair, breastfeeding the baby. We are in a common room, and even though she is facing a wall, anyone could have seen her. I stand behind her to block her from view, and I whisper to her that she is being reckless.
She doesn’t answer.
I look at her and see that she is slumped over, asleep, bent in such a way that I think she must have dropped the baby, and it will start crying any second. The people who captured us will know about her, and she won’t be safe anymore. I crouch in front of my mom, and I try to shake her awake.
“Where’s the baby?” I hiss. “Where’s the baby?”
She is angry with me for waking her up, insisting the baby is fine, wherever it was.
“No,” I say, “you dropped it. We have to find it.”
There is another captured woman nearby, but the people in charge reward us if we keep each other in line. If she sees the baby before we find it, she will tell.
I look around the chair. I look under it. I look and look, but the baby is gone.
In elementary school, I’d crouch down by the couch where my mother was sleeping and shake her awake to sign my progress reports; without her signature, I’d have to spend recess inside again. She’d get so angry with me. Didn’t I know she needed the rest? Didn’t I know how tiring I was?
After a while, I learned to forge her signature.
When my nephews came to live with me, I often slept in late in the mornings. It was difficult to get Evan to middle school on time, Caleb to daycare (when they would take him). It felt like the only time I was allowed to have a break was when I was sleeping.
When they were in my care, there was so much about my mother that I came to understand, and that understanding shrouded me in dread, twisted my stomach in anxiety and disgust.
In 2019, I put so much effort into healing and nurturing my inner child because my biological clock had begun to tick. I wanted to be a mother, and I wanted to do it the right way. In fact, I had wanted to adopt. I wrote long journal entries, hoping to manifest a future where I was a single mother to two adopted children (because, even then, when I was doing all that work, I couldn’t imagine a co-parent, a dependable adult in my life). When Kayleigh asked me to take her kids in March 2020, I’ll admit I took a few days to think about it, but ultimately, I was happy to say yes. It felt like fate.
But later that same year, my internal transformation felt distant, so far in the past that it was like it never happened at all.
My own reflection felt alien to me.
Is it any wonder then that so many of my dreams were set in outer space?
Dreaming about outer space, from what I read, means you need space. You’re feeling smothered; you need more freedom. Someone is pushing your boundaries.
You are feeling alone and like there is no one you can trust.
Dreaming about space also means you’re trying to attribute meaning to what has happened to you. You are looking at the stars and wondering if they are looking back at you, if perhaps the patterns people make on this earth are constellations from where they stand. You are wondering:
What shapes do we make?
Who are the saviors, and who are the monsters?
Does anyone out there care about the suffering of little children?
Andie Carver received their MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University, and their poetry collection, TRAILER TRASH, can be read at ModusOperandiee.com. Andie lives in the Dallas area with their cat, Bernie.