The Dream that Saved

Here he is. The man I’ve always adored. The man who raised me from day one. The one who held me when I cried, who hugged me when I was hurt, and who comforted me whenever I was scared of the monsters under the bed. My favorite person in the whole world stands in front of me now, yet, I don't recognize him at all. How could someone I’d known my whole life become a stranger to me in just a matter of hours? Scary movies, orange creamsicle ice cream, ham and cheese hot pockets, double stuffed Oreos, cool ranch Doritos, and DiGiorno’s rising crust pizza. This was the shopping list for every other Friday night when my father would pick my older sister and I up from my mother at the usual meeting spot, the gas station on the corner. It never changed. We would go to his apartment and I would curl up in my dad’s big arms and watch scary movies and eat junk food all weekend. I felt the safest in his arms, like nothing could ever hurt me. I was the most real definition of a “daddy’s girl” you would ever find. When I was younger, I loved life, but I loved my father even more. He was the image of perfection. In my eyes, he was this hero that could save me from anything. I cried leaving his apartment; I never wanted to leave him. However one night, I cried for a new reason.

My dad has had back problems for as long as I can remember, resulting in many back surgeries and medication. This one night in November of my sixth-grade year, he took too much of the wrong medicine and went absolutely insane. He ran around the apartment yelling at people that weren’t actually there. He tore apart the bedroom we all shared because he said it was falling into a black hole. He walked around all night laughing, the sort of laugh you would hear from the possessed character in a horror movie, just like the scary movies we used to rent every weekend. However, this time, my father was the monster in the film. The worst part of the whole night took place at about three in the morning. During his horror movie cackles my sister and I sat on the couch holding each other, sobbing. He walked into the living room from the kitchen holding a large butcher’s knife. He walked up to my sister and I and stood there in front of us, holding it, laughing, and shattering my heart. At that moment, at eleven years old, I accepted that I was going to die that night. Luckily, he put the knife down, and later on my sister called the cops at about five in the morning, and saved me.

As I gripped my teddy bear, I witnessed the cops and paramedics pull my father out of the apartment. I watched as he screamed and fought them, and I even heard him tell them that I wasn't his daughter. I cried so much that night, but for the next day or two, I cried for the wrong reason. I was so scared that they were going to take my father away from me. What would I do without my dad, my best friend? I was so heartbroken, not because he had tortured me for eight hours, or because he had almost killed me, but because I didn't want to lose him. I had no clue what the reality of the situation really was. A few days after that night I had the nightmare that changed everything. In this dream, all the events of the night played on repeat over again and I relived it all, however when the time got to three a.m. and he walked in with the knife, rather than putting it down, my father murdered me. This dream has been with me for the last seven years and was an every night occurrence for the first couple, but has now settled down to only once every few months. While this dream haunted me and hurt me over and over again, it possibly could have saved my life.

After I had this dream I finally realized that I had been crying for the wrong reason. The dream could very well have been my reality that night, and I was ignoring that. I was dismissing the true facts of what happened, to save the man I thought my dad was. Because of this dream, I gained a level of curiosity. I went to my mother and started asking her questions, like how their marriage really ended, who he truly was, and what he had done in his past. I learned that he used to physically and mentally abuse my older brother and that he has an extreme bipolar disorder, among many other things. I found out who my father really was, and I got out of the toxic relationship that I previously thought to be so harmless and healthy. I set boundaries, and I never let myself stay another night in the same house as him. If I had not had that dream, I never would have asked questions, and I never would have gotten away. I would still be fighting and crying for him. That dream saved me from the torture of the future that could have been.

In his essay The Symbolic Language of Dreams, Stephen King talks about the importance of dreams and what they can really mean. He says, “I think that dreams are a way that people’s minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language” (King 4). I can not agree with this more. My dream was formed out of the real issues and fears I was holding inside, but wasn't allowing to surface on their own. I wasn't accepting the reality of the situation and my problems, but my dream spoke to me and woke me up. A dream is a work of art. Whether it's an ugly painting or a beautiful one, it’s art, and all it wants is to tell it's story. My childhood experience created art of it’s own by sculpting the most terrifying nightmare I could imagine. However, while it haunted me at night, it is very possible it could have saved me a lot more days to come. King is extremely accurate when he says that dreams evaluate your deeper emotions. Mine was able to extract the reality of a life-threatening situation that I wasn’t capable of, or willing to see on my own, and save me from the man who once was my hero, but later became my monster under the bed.