I must’ve been about 7 or 8 years old, but it’s unclear. Most likely it was somewhere between 5 and 9.
I woke up suddenly with a sharp pain under my left ribs, and a man on top of me. He had his other hand on my throat and a sharp object in my side. The pain under my ribs was so intense that I wasn’t aware of the feeling of being raped.
The man was familiar to me. Family. He was probably in his late teens or early twenties at the time.
He said things to me, but the details are unclear. I laid there as still as I could, confused about what was happening and in shock from the pain.
This sequence of events was from a dream that woke me a few years ago. It was at a point in my life when I was in therapy during my divorce and going through EMDR treatments for a handful of other traumatic experiences I’ve had. The dream was so real that the pain under my ribs woke me. As soon as I woke up, I knew who the man was: my mom’s youngest brother, a schizophrenic who’d struggled with drug abuse for many years and who also served time in prison for being caught in a child-porn sting.
I knew some details about this man’s childhood because through the years my mom and other family members revealed the horrors that came from growing up in that household. Both brothers would end up becoming schizophrenic. It was clear that they suffered the brunt of the abuse. I don’t know much about what the sisters went through, but I’m sure it was deeply traumatizing as well.
Growing up in Las Vegas, my mother kept us away from her family in Ogden, Utah. I remember traveling from Las Vegas to Ogden only one time before traveling for my grandfather’s funeral at some point during my teenage years. It didn’t occur to me until years later that she may have been strategically keeping her distance to protect her own children from the monsters in that house. Sadly the next generation did not escape unscathed- I know that the same man in my dream, my mother’s youngest brother, abused some of my cousins.
I do not know if he abused me or my brother. My mother died in 2006. I asked my dad if he was aware of anything, and he was not. My dad had his own traumas he suffered from while I was growing up, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was too caught up in them to notice anything suspicious happening with his children while we were in that house visiting my mother’s family.
I do not know if the dream that I had was a memory. Perhaps my brain concocted it from the things I learned over the years about the horrific childhood my mother and her siblings had.
If it was real, it would explain many things about why I am the way that I am. The fears that I have that do not make sense.
Perhaps I will never know if that dream was real, and perhaps that is for the best. Is it possible to heal things that your consciousness is repressing?