Years- Decades – Of Nightmares
For a long time, since teenage to even now
often, I have been afraid of sleeping. It is not that I am so afraid when
awake, but it is that when I slept there would be the nightmares on and on –
and those years, those decades they had a constant recurring theme. There was
someone pursuing me with full intention of destroying, killing, whatever, and
sometimes I was fleeing screaming and sometimes I just knew it would not work.
The nightmares are now on a wane and though
the anxiety against sleep has not quite gone so easily sometimes there are nice
dreams, where I get to see those who cared and I cared about, who are no more.
Waking from those dreams is nice and yet with a sense of loss of not seeing
them, but the recurring dreams brings a feeling of them being there for me, not
left and gone completely, and I am brought some much needed soothing.
Nightmares had a reality that was just as
vivid and a certainty of the pursuer being opposite of caring. The one time I
remember waking up crying, he was actually sitting next and asking me what was
wrong. I was only fifteen and had not the courage to say it was he who was
terrorising and pursuing in the nightmare, too.
Another vivid one after I left was when I
lived with his brother’s family for a year – and that year, the first year
after leaving home, I screamed or cried and so forth in my sleep almost
regularly – was one where he was with the youngest one and we were all near a
well and the little one was asking me why I was going to jump into the well,
and I knew I needed to protect the little brother, and so did not tell him I
was being forced by his father – I never want to say mine – and so I tenderly
held the little brother and told him it was because the frog in the well was
calling me. The little brother was only eight when I left, and though eight had
not been small for me, it was for him, whether being the youngest or just
different rates of growth. He was not quite content with the explanation, but I
woke up with a cousin of the same age shaking me and laughing over the
dialogue, it seems I had spoken loudly.
There were others before I left even – one
where I was being pursued by some one ferocious with a weapon. But the very
first one I remember was when I was three. I found myself on the train tracks
with a train coming at me with a huge headlight and I could only scream. I was
shaken awake and informed it was only a dream, but it had been too real.
Did it have something to do with being aware
of the intentions of the father who took me to throw me on the train tracks
close to our home when I was about one, I have always wondered. Why didn’t I
run in the dream, why wa I afraid in the first place? I wasn’t a child usually
afraid, was it because of a real memory of someone holding me on the train tracks,
threatening me?
Children are not stupid and in fact they are
more than aware of hearts of people, not being fooled by the needs of social or
political sort, much less economic considerations – but mercifully they forget
because they need to, just to survive.
I wonder if I was actually put down on the
tracks and then picked up or the coward was too aware of the people around and
the possibility of being caught at the very public place to do that, and if
that was the only reason I was brought back and her other creations were taken
instead and thrown on the tracks instead, paintings and so forth. But the
nightmare was so real I am pretty sure I knew even then what his intention was
and why I was brought back, and I think chances are more than even he actually
did strongly want to throw me down, and was only held back due to people
around, not willing to either risk jail much less public condemnation or legal
execution.
Much later once he tried to put it that his
restrictions and verbal abuse had to do with concern – I was late coming from
university that was across the town and changing three or four buses took all
of two hours average, starting at four or so, all the while without food since
morning, he gave too little to barely support lunch for the rest and there was
no money for my lunch – and I could have reminded him of the years he was late
and told the family not to worry and he could very well be dead in a roadside
ditch – actually he was only visiting a friend generally – but instead I remembered
only the greatest discrepancy.
Anyone who is worried about an eighteen year
old coming home late couldn’t possibly have sent out a twelve year old in the
same city late at night with strict instructions to go alone.
This was within a year of the whole traumatic
day leading up to her hospitalisation in ’66. I was eleven and the youngest but
one, Mgm, was six. Next year she had typhoid, and since the one before her had
had it at about the same age we were not worried – but this one just went down
and wouldn’t talk or even wake up. I remember mother telling me she might not
make it.
And then one night I was sent out to walk for
a half hour to fetch medicine from a distant market and trek back another half
hour, while mother was simultaneously sent out to the dispensary to see the
doctor, with strict instructions not to even walk out together. It was well
past seven and dark, and I simply could not comprehend the instructions, the
idea. He had a perfectly good vehicle and could have fetched the medicine in
about ten minutes flat, what with his speeding usually. Why this sending us out
while he stayed home to sit around? At any rate mother instructed me to just
wait around the corner; she went walking with me and back, and then as I was
within a reasonably safe distance of home without us being seen together she
left again to go to the dispensary. Since the dispensary was a central
government place as was the colony it was always crowded and the delay was not
unusual, so we were not questioned.
And so when he accused me of
being late and causing worry I asked how he could have sent me out in the same
dangerous city to walk alone for more than an hour and a half over a distance
that was full of lonely stretches and known to have roaming lumpen young males at
all hours. Non plussed, since there was no answer that could be sensible or
logical, he resorted to informing Mgm about how I had resented fetching
medicine when she was small and almost dying while he prayed over her.
I wonder what if any effect she had from any
of this. As it is it is only recently that I have thought about a little six
year old going through all that – then, I was only eleven, and perspectives
change – and can only surmise that the various shocks culminating in the horror
day and the hospitalisation and the grandmother who came to see her daughter
alive being not allowed into the house all resulted in the little girl feeling
overwhelmed with being so daunted, that she did not perhaps wish to live or
certainly had no strength to fight to live.
She used to be such a sweet, quiet little
girl. And she was never the same after the typhoid. Always frazzled, always
more than ready to cry – and screaming, too – that racked our nerves. Life
wasn’t any easier just because mother had survived, and we couldn’t have
afforded to give in and cry. I cried a little at eighteen once when mother
asked me if I wanted to reconsider the decision, I don’t remember if it was
about my further study or having to leave – and she was shocked to see tears in
my eyes.
If that incident of my being told to go out
far in the dark had not been brought up then I might have not remembered it so
easily or questioned it, but once it did the memory and the question stayed on
the back burner, and only recently I have a glimmer of the answer. I suspect he
had planned my death that night and would have been glad to spread the word
about his denouncing someone who sneaked out unapproved for indecent purposes
and died – he never had any problem lying, planning and manipulating others
into his web of lies, and considers it his smartness – and meanwhile he was
ready to use hellish powers to take my life and use it to bring back to life
the frightened and unwilling little dying girl so she would be frightened for
ever and obedient to any purpose of his, including his wife’s destruction. She
foiled the plan and I am certain that was only one of the times she saved my
life.
And Mgm came back to life not quite as
obedient or malleable but then again who knows, while the little one – as I
still think of her – thought she was fighting and outsmarting perhaps she
played into his hands and went with his plans all along, unknown to her. He
needed a trophy child or two and that was necessary for destruction of others
without being blamed while he could spread terror as well, and he did get the
trophy children. That others were not quite so destroyed as he wished had to do
with mother saving us and he never stopped attempting destruction of us – or
for that matter manipulation and use of anyone else either.
Human slavery is never attractive and he
missed out on the most important fact – the least attractive, the most
disgusting is the slaver. Of those who would destroy others, enslave and
manipulate and so forth, the very first thing that can be said is that they
have no soul, no heart, no life, even. They miss out on the greatest gift of
the Divine – an opportunity to rise through the precious life given as a gift.
While pulling others down, they lose all they could – and it is just as well,
too, for they deserve to.
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