REM

Despite my love for the sunlight and the day, sometimes I do see myself as a creature of the night. At least in Hawaii, night is almost always my favorite time. That's when everything calms down. The volcanic energy rests, the waves wash over the hot sand, the stars hold the watch and make sure that the islands see some peace and I find myself relaxed and creative. Well, it's suiting that I now find myself in a country where night sets in around 3pm (at least in November.) I do wish that there was more daylight, just because it's annoying to not be able to see things clearly, and because if you wake up late and spend an hour or so snuggling, you'll only have an hour or two of light left. WEIRD. It's like you've been robbed of time. But it's just something to get used to. Now I can hoot my night-owl call for hours!

Sleep has been something that's fascinated me for a long time. I wonder if I was depressed as a child, because it took me hours to fall asleep (lack of serotonin/ melatonin). I remember laying awake until real shadows started to form out of the blackness of my room, and the frogs stopped their croaking. Not sure if this was my over-developed night-vision kicking in, or actual shadows from the presence of light. In any case, my hyperactive imagination and anxiety kept me awake as a kid. When I did manage to find sleep, it was usually troubled or tainted by the most phantasmagoric dreams a 6-year-old could have. The dreamworld is a weird one, and it is thought to be induced by raised levels of DMT in our brains while we sleep (more so in children and babies) but some of my dreams were straight up trips. I dreamt horrible things, repetitive things, impossible things, and I remembered everything to the t the next morning.

In 8th grade we were supposed to write up a dream for English homework, and my teacher's only red-mark on my paper was "Psychedelic" written across the top. I do have a very fantastic imagination during waking hours, and try to keep that child-like creativity, but lately that hasn't been presenting itself in my sleeping thoughts much. It's been a few months since I've dreamt (or remembered) but in the past week I've been having epic nightmares—one night after another.

It started off with a dream that involves something that's been on my mind for a few weeks:

In the dream I was an adult but somehow also a child. I was living in a strange home on a horse-farm in Germany, and I woke up late, in a wooden child's bed in the attic-room of this old house. The room was sunny and honey-colored furniture stood against the wooden walls. Everything was in a haze and I had on a pair of pale pink pajamas with kittens on them, that were actually my favorites as a kid. Everything was soft and warm, like really well worn egyptian cotton sheets and children's t-shirts, and everything was viscous (the German word to describe this feeling would be 'Zäh', which is kind of like tenacious or thick and tough, but can be used to describe molasses or honey, for example.) I had a hard time grasping time and the air seemed too thick to move through. It was roughly 1 in the afternoon and I knew that I was supposed to be babysitting a neighbor's child at 3. But I also had another appointment on my agenda, a quite horrible one, to take place around 2. There was apparently an arrangement between my ex and I, that I would be raped at 2 o'clock. In my dream this is an appointment that occurred frequently and I didn't like it but since everything was viscous and hazy I felt that I had no choice but to agree... Well, this very viscous, honey-colored morning I was trying to get out of the softness of my bed that seemed to melt into the air into one big soft, impermeable texture and go "get raped" before I had to babysit. My mom came into the room and wouldn't stop talking to me, and her voice slowed things down even more. It caused me such anxiety because time was slipping away and I couldn't take control of my agenda. I kept trying to tell her that I really had to go to see "****" before babysitting and she didn't seem to understand. Eventually I broke down and told her the stories of our dates, how it felt to be with him, how my presence and performance was a payment for our outings. How the alcohol flowed and how I felt hopeless and tricked. I was sobbing this to her, and she acted as if she had known all along. I called him and told him he would no longer be raping me and then I ran outside in my pink pajamas and there were horses running around and willow trees where whipping the air with their swooping branches and I started to spiral with my phone into a whirlwind until I woke up...

This dream is significant because I told a true story in a fictional setting. No, I've not been raped in real life, but everything that I spoke to my mom was as if I'd repeated the story of that relationship to another other person in total honesty. Down to the rips in my clothes, the bruises on my chest and wrists, the awful pain my lower back, and that sinking, nauseous feeling of being used and neglected. Of driving home piss-drunk because I wasn't allowed to spend the night, and kissing the garage floor in gratitude for making it home safely. Of jumping into the salty waves early in the morning to purge myself of that scent of un-desired sex mixed with latex, alcohol and his awful cologne. Of that un-granted desire for even a hint of an emotional connection. No, he never raped me, not in the strict sense of the word. But he also wouldn't take no for an answer. There was no point to meet up if sex wasn't somehow included in the run of the day. On our second date I happened to have my period. We went out for drinks- he had something like 5 glasses of red wine, I had tea. The scales weren't tipped in my favor and although I awkwardly tried to state that I was going home because, well... nothing would be happening that night he ignored my request for me-time and did me anyway. It was awful to hear, "Oh, well you know what this means. Since you're on your period I'm gonna cum inside you." —Excuse me, but no you're fucking NOT!—As a doctor, he should have known better, or so I would have hoped. I felt shredded, as if I didn't even have a nice bloody week to hide out in my own body and just be still.

A few months passed this way, and I'm not sure why I never backed out. Something to do with the social pressure of doing something remarkable with my life, and since I wasn't doing anything "remarkable", "dating a doctor" seemed to sound good—at least to my parents. A doctor who was an alcoholic,  didn't recycle, was a total ass in regards to my body, made fun of me for my artistic, alternative, "hippie-child"— as he liked to put it— view on life, and threw me funny looks whenever I mentioned a vegetable that he'd never heard of. A doctor who constantly reminded me, "Sooo...we haven't, you know, had sex in kind of a while..." (if it had been more than 3 days...) and who refused to let me do anything which put me in power. At first I thought it was the whole gentlemen-y thing of holding the door open or letting me into the elevator first, but I soon came to realize that it was much more about ego than about graciousness.
How did I manage to spend six months of my life waiting for the "deed" to be over, purposely expediting it so that I could just —what?—struggle to not fall off the edge of the bed where I'd been pushed too, sometimes actually resorting to the corner at the bottom because his iron-pumped physique hogged the whole damn mattress, and I couldn't move him for the life of me,  and his pig-like snores drove me there. Half a year of feeling like a bug. No he never raped me, but one night he drunkenly uttered a threat that he would, while we were already at it. "Don't make me rape you!" —"Uhh, did you really just say that?" —"Yeah, I get what I want..."

That's when the fear kicked in. If he had tried, I probably wouldn't have stood much of a chance to stop him, he being like double my weight in muscle and not a single ounce of fat. What a comforting thought! Why even attempt to resist, it would just result in unnecessary bruises and sore spots. And the wine flowed, and I couldn't see it anymore. And I drank kombucha religiously instead, and tried to drown out the drunken, barked sarcastic comments about my sourdough or my salad or my garden. I was never "beautiful," not even "pretty," never "kind" or "creative" or anything good. I was "fascinating" at best, and that compliment came only once after I fought to explain my love for sheep, upon seeing some on the side of a volcano....and that "compliment" was followed by a slurred, wine-induced -on-his-end argument about my political view and then a dead snore for 3 hours...

 Every single day I hoped for a humanistic spark, some thing to grow on. But of course that never came. I thought about leaving him every damn day, and I cried at night when I didn't. My mom told me I was being ridiculous to think of letting him go, and convinced me to stay with him. I actually still feel sick to my stomach when I think of his Easter BBQ, where he sat in the hot-tub, completely inebriated, rib-sauce smeared up his cheeks from the corners of his mouth, barking and grunting in his drunk manner about how was right about one thing or another... and I remember begging his friends not to leave so early, because I didn't want to be stuck there alone with him drunk, me sober and sobbing inside. I left, thank god... but it only lead to sarcastic text-messages. The most twisted thing of all, is that I had somehow been planning to move to California—not directly with him, but to the neighboring town. I tried to convince myself that I was going there for my own sake, but I wasn't. I had been planning to visit Germany and Sweden over the summer, and meet up with him at the end of July. I ended up staying here instead, and thank god I did. What the fuck was I thinking?—clearly not-thinking. Or thinking the wrong thoughts—caring what others thought of my life and my relationships and whatnot. He was some substitute for my guilty conscience for dropping out of med-school. "Oh, well... I don't have to be the doctor, I could be with a doctor." Nope... word of advice: NEVER date doctors. They drink like motherfucking pigs, talk shit about fat people, threaten to rape their girlfriends, drink some more, drink even more, snore, slobber, and then whine if you don't stroke their egos (or dicks for that matter).(There's no hope, I will never have enough good things to say about medicine to weigh against all these bad experiences I've had. Unfortunate...)

Well now, here I am, six months after the last time I ever had to look at him, and it's just starting to hit me. Why does everything always take so long to affect me? In any case, these experiences are boring themselves into my subconscious and presenting themselves in overtly realistic dreams. Sometimes it seems better to skip the REM phase altogether, because all my dreams have become so disturbing, that they actually impact my mood for days. Can't I just dream about rainbows and unicorns and those things that normal children dream about? (Not like I'm a child now, but even as a child I never had the pleasure of living in those sprinkle-covered dreamscapes.) And now I have nightmares almost every night. I think my brain is finally not dealing with any new stress (oh, only after 18 years of it being packed on) so it's slowly and in reverse order starting to deal with all those stashed pains and piles of unexamined emotions. Sometimes (often) I wish my mind wouldn't have to be so burdened with these past traumas, and that I could just see the world in a less jaded way; so that I could actually take down my walls and defenses and feel things right away, and not wait years for them to attack me in my sleep.

All day and all evening I felt this weighing me down. We had a birthday party at our apartment and afterwards I had to go for a walk—though it was incredibly cold out. I walked to my favorite pond and noticed that the surface seemed solid. It didn't feel cold enough for a pond to freeze over, but I had to check, so I took a handful of gravel and tossed it to see what would happen. The rocks plunked and jumped across what was, in fact, ice, and made little hollow tapping sounds. Ah, what the night owl sees when she just goes exploring! It was the perfect thing for me to do, to breathe frozen air, freeze a little bit and collect my thoughts.

I feel like this post belongs more under "story" than under my normal blog-roll, but I'm too tired to do that right now. And I feel like it's so out of place from the rest of the story that it wouldn't make sense. But it's a thought that seriously needed attending to... so, please ignore this if you're not interested. I'm just spitting out overdue thoughts.