There is a recurring nightmare that I have been having since the mid ’90’s. Not regularly, but every several years it makes an appearance. Sometimes it returns over a period of several weeks. It is never a welcome visitor.
In the beginning, it’s always an airport. It’s always the middle of the night. There is always a sky full of stars. A person parks on the top level of a deserted parking garage and gets out of the car. Sometimes there is ice and snow that sparkles in the moonlit star-drenched night. Sometimes, it’s a warm summer night. Still star-drenched. Either way, the woman stops under the night sky and marvels at how beautiful it all is. She hums to herself and twirls in the night wind. Sometimes her boots crunch in the snow and her cheeks flush with the cold. Other times, her summer dress twirls up as she spins.
She is always happy. She’s there to pick up the man she loves.
When it’s icy, she always wonders why she didn’t think to call ahead and check and see if the flight was delayed due to weather. In the dream, there’s never such a thing as a smart phone to check. The dream started before there were miracle phones.
It’s always a woman. I am often not sure if the woman is me or all women or a specific woman in particular, but frequently it is me. Sometimes she doesn’t look like me, but she still is. Other times she does. Sometimes she isn’t me at all, I am just watching the dream like a movie. The first time, the woman was me.
She always twirls a few times under the bright, bright stars and goes into the airport. Humming.
The airport isn’t one she’s ever been to before. It’s very bright. Very white. Very clean. There are hardly any people around. The bars and shops are closed. No flights are arriving.
There is one gallery open, and she wanders in to see if they have any interesting pieces.
There are a few sculptures, and some fairly good paintings. She turns to start to walk out, and a curtain opens in front of a one way mirror that she can see through. Thinking it must be a performance piece, she stops in front of the window. On a stool, there is a nude child. Sometimes it’s a boy, sometimes a girl. Always very young. Three to six years old, maybe. The child is sleeping, or maybe sedated. The woman looks around for a way to get into the room. It’s not right for this nude child to be on display. She calls out, thinking someone from the gallery will help her. She notices that there isn’t a cash register or any apparent place for staff to enter or leave other than the main door.
She goes back out into the airport, but no one is at any of the check-in desks any more. She doesn’t see a phone anywhere so she can contact the police. The airport appears to be deserted.
She goes back into the gallery, and sees that there is a masked man in the room with the child now. He has what appears to be a sharpened antler or piece of horn in his hand, and he has tied the child down, gagged him, and is flaying him with the sharp object. He turns to the mirror occasionally and cuts pieces of the child’s hair easily. Like he is demonstrating how sharp his crude knife is.
Blood drips onto the floor.
The child is sedated, but not unconscious. The man turns on a speaker so she can hear that the child is whimpering.
That is when she realizes that as the man is cutting the child’s skin off piece by piece, he is masturbating. Then she realizes that she is almost as aroused as he is.
Then I wake up screaming.
The first time I had the dream, I was living alone and going through a very dark patch. I wasn’t sleeping well. The night terrors didn’t help that situation. My complicity with a child being tortured kept me awake for days. During the day, I obsessed about what the dream meant, and what it meant that I hadn’t helped the child. What it meant that I was getting off on it. When I did sleep, the nightmare would wake me up again.
Eventually, it occurred to me that I needed to separate the me in the dream from the me in real life. It didn’t make the nightmare any less disturbing, but it did give me enough distance from it to stop blaming myself for the evil committed in a dream. It seems like that would have been obvious, but at that point in my life I was really not functioning rationally.
I was blaming my real self for actions and responses that were purely imaginary. Not only imaginary but unconscious.
Once I realized that, the dream mostly stopped. It returns every few years, usually if I am spending a little too much time inside my own head.
It still keeps me from sleeping when I have it.
Even though I know that I am not someone who gets off on watching children be mutilated, I still find myself wondering what sort of evil I think I am complicit in that causes the dream to keep coming back.
If I figure it out, maybe it will stop.