Saturday 16 July 2011

Flashback

[Warning - this post contains graphic content]


At 4am I screamed myself awake in full-on terror. It was nothing like any of the times I've woken up screaming before, and I sense it was hugely significant.

The first difference from those other times is that I was fast asleep and had been for hours. I was dreaming, nothing scary, though I can't remember what. Then suddenly I sensed somebody lunging at me, full of the most mind-blowing hatred. They wanted to kill me because they hated me more than I can imagine anyone hating anything. My eyes jerked open, expecting to see a face leaning over me, and instead there was a descending square of blackness with light around the edges, like a pillow was being brought down on my face, like the way the blackness exploded when the other car hit me. All I could think of was images of my father abusing me, coupled with awareness of all the years of pain since the accident, the horror of the past few days' betrayal by my doctor and abandonment by my consultant - the only two male authority figures I actually trusted - and their use of morphine as a weapon against me, plus imminent suffocation.

It was two or three years ago that I started remembering my father trying to suffocate me with a cushion as a baby, but that was just intellectual memory - this time I was actually reliving it.

I drew parellels then between the cushion pressing down on my face and the impact of the airbag during the accident and my father pushing down on my chest to hold me down as a child.

I lay there too terrified to move for 15 minutes, sweating like a pig. The pain exploded, subsided and rose again like a wave. I could feel my father's presence in the room, and I could taste him. I could feel him in my mouth (and sorry, but yes, that does mean what it sounds like - my father forcing me to have oral sex at five years old).

I have a horrible, horrible feeling all this is an indication that that new book I couldn't cope with was right, that all the pain stems from my abuse, and the only way to stop it is to deal with that. But last time I tried, it left me sobbing every night and terrified of my own flat.

But all the memories and sensations are swirling around with the pain and with the messages from that book, plus the awful out-of-control feeling the morphine gives, which has always felt so reminiscent of the powerlessness I felt as an abused child. And of course there's the way the morphine has always opened doorways into my subconsious.

It's like my mind has shoved all the relevant factors into a pot, jumbled it all together and then taken the lid off so I can see the connections. As though all the stuff this week happened just to paint me a picture.

I'm afraid I do believe in that kind of hippy shit. Several key moments in my life have followed highly symbolic dreams, and those dreams have a very particular feel to them: just like this.

But if the answer is that I have to come off the morphine in order to deal with the suppressed emotions about the abuse ... I don't think I have the strength.

Or maybe the message is to let the dice fall where they may over morphine availability - stop stressing about it and trying to control it. And if the doctors do stop it, or limit it to the point that it becomes ineffectual, then rather than going straight to suicide, take one final shot at resolving the pain by dealing with the emotions.

It's the kind of solution that fits with how these symbolic dreams have worked in the past, it ties in with everything that came out of the hypnotherapy several years ago. And it fits with what I realised talking to my sister the other day, that I don't want to die - I just want to be pain-free.

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