Willing Myself To Waken

Another night of one of those haunted, haunting dreams. Not my idea of a dream, it is a nightmare from which I cannot escape. There are just so many versions of the same frightening prospect of being lost, not being able to find my way home. Much worse, being separated from my life-companion, searching for him desperately, and only finding him when I finally wake up. Rescued from another nightmare.

I read too many of those personal accounts of dreadful acts that people commit against one another. When the human psyche goes berserk. But that's only part of it. My husband also has similar disturbing dreams. Where he cannot find his way home, despite his anxious determination to come home to me. It's all that travelling he had to do throughout his working life, he tells me. It's the memory of loneliness, of impersonal hotel rooms and foreign destinations.

For me, it's more that when he travelled I yearned to hear from him, to feel him close again beside me. He was always good about that. No matter where he was, halfway across the world, he would telephone me, and that was comforting. He would come home from his workplace appearing quieter than usual. That should have tipped me off to a forthcoming trip, but it always surprised me when he finally explained he would be off again.

To places throughout the length and breadth of Canada, in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Great Britain, Ireland, China. At first I thought how utterly privileged he is to travel like that and see the world, and I had to scold myself if I ever remotely revealed to him my sense of apprehension. I made a deliberate attempt to be pleased for him. And when he returned from one of those weeks-long trips, I'd listen carefully to his perceptions and experiences.

Travel by proxy. What had seemed exciting and romantic early on in his career, became a dreary re-occurrence. Some deep-seated fear must have lodged itself in the depths of my being, in some dark and secret place where it is dredged up from time to time, transformed to one of those impossible dreams. Last night's was not quite typical but then not quite atypical.

We were young again, young parents of a family of three pre-adolescent children. We had travelled somewhere for a holiday; not an exotic vacation, since at that time we did not stray all that far from home, although I've no idea where, in the dream, we were. Suddenly, my husband was somewhere else, not with us, he had told me he had somewhere he must go to, and would soon return. But he did not, and I was left with the children in some strange place.

Where I suddenly became alerted to the fact that the small town or village in which we had ensconced ourselves for our temporary stay, was bristling with people hostile to our presence. Men, women and children, all were alert to our presence, and demonstrated unmistakably ill intentions toward us. I gathered the children and we began our swift exodus from the town, but we were followed by irate people.

They threatened to kill us, all of us. I thought surely, my husband would appear, take charge of things, defuse this peculiar threatening situation, but he did not. We fled, and the throngs followed. We sought refuge in a house in the surrounding countryside and the people there behaved no differently, and seemed prepared to kill us there and then.

There were two children in the house, besides my own; one a toddler with a bonnet and a frilly dress. I scooped her up, said I would do to her what they planned to do to me and my children, and suddenly the situation changed. We were permitted to leave, refusing to leave the child, taking her with us. We wandered about, looking for a safe haven, looking for my husband.

Then we were confronted with the mob again and leading them was the family whose child I had abducted. To demonstrate quite how serious I was, I threatened to bash the child's head against the wall of a nearby house, and the crowd became very still, no longer belching bellicose abuse. I thought to myself, we would escape, we would be re-united with my husband, and I would retain the child, and raise her as our own.

Again, the crowd followed and confronted us with vicious intent. As so often happens when I have a nightmare that I cannot escape from, I woke. Aware in my drowsy state of the content of my dream, willing myself not to resume the nightmarish dream if I fell asleep, and despite that, when I fell asleep a few moments later, the dream resumed. In the dream I was acutely aware that I could escape by willing myself to awaken.

And I did.