Nightmares

Today I went to bed at 12:30am and woke from a nightmare at 4:30am.  Four hours of disturbed sleep even with the prescribed medicines my oncologist had given me to help me sleep.  This is the second nightmare in less than a week which ended with me wide awake and unable to go back to sleep.

Some believe that there are messages in our dreams.  Some believe that while we sleep our brains are processing unfinished business from the day or perhaps working on repressed or subconscious thoughts.  There all are kinds of dream interpretation “experts” claiming the ability to interpret the general weirdness of a dream into some kind of presumed reality.  Nightmares, it is suggested, are a category of dreams that serve as a warning about deep subconscious concerns or fears that we supposedly repress during our wake periods.  Nightmares are dreams that warn us about those fears and we should take nightmares seriously as the concerns and fears that give rise to the nightmare need to be confronted and resolved.  It seems to be suggested that if we don’t address those deep rooted fears, well, nothing good will come of it.

Do I believe all this?  Honestly I can’t say that I do or do not believe it.  I remember years ago spending an inordinate amount of time pondering my dreams after first reading what was being suggested.  For those dreams that I could remember I would try drawing some correlation between them and whatever was going on in my life at the time, both professionally and personally.  Truth be told for the most part I could never accomplish tying a dream to some event from my wake periods.  I’ve had frightening dreams that have included bears and snakes.  I don’t know that I have any real fear of those two animals yet while dreaming of them I was terrified.

Some have suggested that objects in a dream themselves have hidden meaning.  The presence of bears in a dream, they say, represent solitude and introspection, perhaps even depression.  The meaning of a snake in a dream, on the other hand, seem to span everything from suppressed sexuality issues to some form of transformative rebirth.

Unfortunately the nightmares of this week had neither bears or snakes in them.  The first dream, from last Sunday night, involved a male child who was in danger, some adult figures I who I can’t remember that much, in other words strangers.  What I remember was that the child was in some kind of danger and I was trying to save him.  I don’t remember any defined danger, just that there was some.  The dream woke me and I spent the night exhausted but unable to go back to sleep.

Tonight’s nightmare had Marvina in it and an unknown father figure, apparently hers.  Maybe it wasn’t a father figure but it was an older male and there relationship seemed to be that which one might expect between a father and daughter.  That part, at least with an immediate viewing, was perhaps absurd given Marvina does not enjoy much, if any, of a relationship with her father.  They don’t speak and there is considerable angst directed towards him.  In the dream the father really didn’t contribute to the nightmare part.

What did was the interplay between Marvina and myself.  There was a series of very stiff and uncomfortable verbal discussions between her and I.  For the most part the conversations were benign, nothing that should have give rise to concern on my part yet there was a kind of undercurrent of stress and yes fear that was present.  Ultimately there was an exchange though that was raw and cutting.  No, not expressions of anger, but blows by her to me that hurt to the core seemingly delivered dispassionately with clearly no concern of any potential damage that might be made.

In the end Marvina left the home we were living in leaving me alone, upset and very distraught.  Enough so that I began physically destroying items I felt contributed to the betrayal I felt.  I broke a phone or some kind of communication device, I’m not sure which.  Then disturbingly I began searching the house for a gun which I found.  In my dream I intended to end my life but even this effort was spoiled when I couldn’t find any bullets for any of the guns I found.  It was at this point that I woke from sleep and got up.  Physically and emotionally I felt as though the dream had been real even though it was only a dream.

Dreams, for the most part, used to be quite entertaining to me.  I’ve even woke myself when I began laughing, real world laughing, about whatever I was dreaming about.  I would lay there occasionally chuckling to myself before drifting off to sleep again.  Dreams of the type I had tonight and last Sunday certainly aren’t funny and I was unable to go back to sleep afterwards.

There are various deep rooted issues I have suppressed over the past few years.  The most serious stemmed from the time Marvina had an extramarital affair.  The affair came after my cancer had been found.  The reasons for the affair are many and, whether you accept it or not, blame for it cannot be affixed exclusively to either Marvina or I.  But the combination of issues stemming from the maiming of my body by the cancer and her affair are complex and many.

A big one, naturally, was the shattering of my trust in her.  The hurt I felt you can perhaps appreciate.  So to can the trust issues that lay about me now.  I’ve worked on the later though, a lot, yet they are still there.  I think that had I not I would frankly not be here today.  The return of the cancer almost a year ago would have served as a death knell, a opportunity to escape and bring it all to an end.  But I didn’t.

In the days of living hell that followed my discovery of her affair there were, thankfully, friends who came to me to help.  Sure there were those who took the position that I should leave her or through her out, people who suggested the best thing for me would be to set fire to that part of my soul and amputate from my life the one person I truly loved.  I chose to ignore people who recommended that action.  There were those that suggested physical harm be done to her and they received an anger from me that left no doubt in their minds that should anything happen to her, anything, nothing would stop me from turning and doing harm to them.  Even though I hurt badly and she was the cause of it I was still protective of her.  I still am.

As I struggled with the damaged remnants of trust one friend, surprisingly wise and gentle, told me that if I still wanted Marvina in my life I would have to learn to trust her again, to allow her to earn that trust and that the way to rebuilding my trust in her would be to let go, to not try to control her.  I should let her show to me that she could indeed be trusted.  So I did.  It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.  The only way I can come close to describing what it was like was to ask you to imagine being blindfolded, tied to a post and facing an unknown firing squad.  Your only input is what you hear.  You hear them debating not going through with the execution.  You even hear their weapons rattle as they are shifted about but never know if they are aiming them at you or whether at any moment a bullet will rip through your heart killing you once-and-for-all.

We each deserve our space in life, our own piece of privacy.  While in marriage there is a surrendering of independence and largely a blending of the two lives there still remains that core need to be alone with our thoughts.  We may share much with each other but there are things that our owns and ours alone that we may not wish to share or may be afraid to out of fear of the other’s reaction to those things we hold inside ourselves.  Normally this is not and should not be an area of concern in a relationship provided it doesn’t impact that relationship in some way.  Privacy and secrecy, I think, can place enormous stress on a relationship particularly when there has been an event that has drawn into question the commitment of one to the other.

Marvina is a private person.  There are issues she struggles with on a daily basis.  Some she has hesitantly shared with me.  No doubt there are plenty she has chosen not to.  She has, on more than one occasion, began a sharing with a warning.  Not a warning about the content of what she was about to share but one aimed at how I might react to what she shared.  The warnings have been clear.  I will share this with you but if you use it somehow to hurt me…  It would seem she has her own trust issues related to me.  I would not use what shares with me to do harm to her.  I love her, more today than I ever have.  But she feels fear.  Perhaps she has never been able to accept that someone could honestly love her.  Perhaps her life before me was filled by those who mouthed the words simply in order to bed her.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that I do love her no matter what has transpired in the past before or with me.  Yes, I still am visited by trust issues and whenever encountering a lack of transparency on her part I become alarmed.  We all deserve our space.  But do we deserve to encounter secrecy, perceived or real?