*as stated elsewhere in this space, I’ve been slowly putting a rough draft of a project I’ve been working on forever (writing my life’s story) down in this space where I can let it breathe and have it hold me accountable to finishing it someday. Emphasize “rought draft,” but here is another installment:
I imagine that, for anyone who has wrestled with and experienced chronic nightmares, they know how hard it is to shake those demons. Night time becomes their playground, that liminal space where they are able to prey on one’s fears. A space where we become truly vulnerable to these vivid portraits being imprinted on our minds.
More, in fact, than just a matter of the mind.
I am five or six years old. Bedtime for me was never a matter of simply giving in to the needed sleep a young body requires. I never knew what awaited me on the other side of the transition from wakefulness to dreaming. There was a transient quality that I noted about the whole process, and through these ealier years the invetible monsters residing within my unconscsious psyche that I both now feared and was growing to expect became more and more common.
And I would always know the moment when their imminant arrival would be made clear, as my chronic nightmares, which played like reoccuring episodes of a serialized show, always picking up where I had left off, would each begin in the same way. I could feel and was consciously aware of that odd and unexplainable moment between wakefulness and sleep, a moment in which I have one foot in both worlds, and it would be in my awareness of occupying this space that I would suddenly experience this feeling of being sucked down a dark, black hole.I didn’t want to go, and yet I had no other choice.
I would emerge from this hole in my dreamspace, again fully aware and conscious of where I was. These dreams tended to tackle similar motifs. One of the most common dreams would find me still in my own bed. Which was always disorienting, because this is the same place in which I was whisked away from the slumbering body that, in some bizarre way, seemed to co-exist with me in this terrorized image of a different kind of wakefulness. As I mentioned, this shared bedroom with my two brothers was one part of a single room, divided by a doorway that separated our space from my parents space. The first thing I would endeavor to do is try to get through that doorway to my parents sleeping space, but I never could. It would inevitably be blocked by something (usually piled up mattresses), and in my efforts to climb over, the beast, the being, whatever it was (it was always the same figure) would come up the stairs and drag me back with it.
It was at this point that I would find myself trapped by this presence, in one particular case chasing me away from our house only to find myself stuck in a loop, experiencing the same feelings of fear over and over again. In another trapping me in a maze that led me deeper and deeper into this ever pressing darkness.
Yes, this was me at 4/5 years old. I’ve spent my entire life since pondering and wondering over what this was. Where did these nightmares come from? Why and how was I having such a vivid existential crisis at a time when I was still barely discovering what the world was? Why do these dreams remain as vivid and real to me all these years later as they did when I was 5 years old?
The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve been given different kinds of answers from people with different sorts of predications and bias, some insisting it has a spiritual origin while others read it through the lens of material explanations. What I do know is that these nightmares, defined as they were through the exercising of some very real fears, have followed me my whole life, simply manifesting itself in different ways within different contexts. I no longer have these chronic nightmares (as I’ll get to in a moment), but the older I got (and get) the more I found it marrying to other sorts of tangible expressions, such as my ensuing battles with anxiety and depression.
The beast is, I have found, a slippery thing. A shapeshifter if you will. And it’s usually at the moment when I think I’ve finally outgrown those childhood fears that they prove as alive and well as they’ve always been, simply finding a new way to impose itself into my ever changing contexts.
And yet, embedded in my memory is a parallel thread. These are moments where I have found myself freed from a specific expression. Moments where hope and healing are made alive, These memories muddle the narrative, I have found, breaking the cycles even where the beast still lingers.
A first turning point came when I had reached Grade 5. I had transitioned from the public school system to our local private institution (Calvin Christian School) in grade 4, In my second year now, it had become common place for me to be riding my bike to school, which followed a meandering street towards these specific short cuts through some as of yet still undeveloped fields towards our bay about 10 or so minutes away. I remember having had a particularly rough day and a long previous night, the sort, familiar to me by this point, that would sit and perculate in my mind through the minutes and hours. At this particular moment it was the afternoon, thus I was coming home from school. I had decided to put my headphones in and was listening to a tape as I was riding. Thus the reason I did not hear or see the car coming around the bend behind me before I turned to cross the road.
What I remember is briefly turning my head to see a car now directly in my face. All I could think to do in what would have been counted in mere seconds, was to close my eyes and throw up my arms.
When I opened my eyes again I was on the other side of the car. Still on my bike. Without a scratch. At which point I remember hearing and experiencing two different things simultaneously. One was the driver, whom had gotten out of their car and was now yelling at me. I remember hearing distinct words
“But how”
“I hit you.”
“This makes no sense.”
“Why weren’t you watching!!”
As these words were filtering in and out of my consciousness I was acutely aware of another voice, one which was speaking with far more clarity and attention. It told me to “let go of my fear.” It assured me that I would have “a long life” (whatever that means I still have no idea) and that my life “would be important.”
Where did this voice come from? My adult mind tends to look at it with skepticism, especially where a life long struggle with fear persists. Too ambiguous to mean anything, too generic to have relevance. The product of a young mind prone to fears and delusions. But even as I do, I have to attend for the way this experience changed the world for that young kid in that moment. I know what it did for the child’s mind for a fact, whether my adult senses trust its reliablity or not. While I didn’t understand the words (truth be told my fears were not exactly manifesting as an awareness of finitude or anything like that, and I wasn’t fearing what we might call physical death), I knew the feeling that followed. It felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. Like some chains had been unshackled, for as corny as that old religious language sounds.
Most important, the chronic nightmares stopped from that point forward.
There’s a lot of life inbetween, but this event is one that would not remerge in my consciousness again until my late twenties and early thirties (in a powerful way, which I will get to). After my graduating year, much of my identity and life would become wrapped up in this small house church turned eventual non-denominational mega-church. I’ll dig deeper into that part of my story later too. But the 10 year span between between 1994 and 2004, would be the period of my life when I found myself really fleshing out my relationship to this idea I called God and faith, something which would come to a head in 2002,2003 as that old beast would rear its head once more. Long before this period of my life however I find this odd memory. This odd story, just sitting there in the atmsophere of my wrestling. I don’t know that its something I would say I forgot, although maybe in a way that’s true. It’s simply something I had compartmentalized. It meant what it meant to that child. The car? The life that almost ended? Those weren’t particularly shocking or revelatory in the moment. What was important was that this demon I had been battling for so long had finally been defeated.
The Stories of my Life 