A Telling Dream

Originally posted December 13, 2009

Over the years, I've learned a lot about interpreting dreams. After leaving my first husband, I had horrific dreams about him, and I had a difficult time focusing on anything else until I figured out what they mean. From those experiences, I came up with a personal rule. If I can't get a dream out of my head, it means something, and I need to write it down and figure it out.

The other night, I had a dream that was really sickening and awful. I think I know what it means. At the very least, I know what it's about. A little warning here, this post is going to discuss some pretty touchy, potentially triggering topics (namely sexual abuse).

So, the dream I had was this man wanted to have sex with his daughter. In the dream, I knew the man, but not well. I think he was actually someone I know in real life, but I'd really rather not think about that part of it. At any rate, his daughter was grown (or at least a teenager), and didn't want to have sex with her father. She came up with a plan that the three of us would get in a pool, and he would have sex with me in the pool, thinking I was her. It didn't really make much sense, because it wasn't dark, I have a different hair color than her, and a different body type, so it would have been obvious to him...but it was a dream, so whatever. This man had sex with "her" (me) from behind. So, I guess that meant that he wasn't paying enough attention to notice that I wasn't her.

After it was all over, I looked down, and his daughter was underneath us, laying on the bottom of the pool. I felt so sad for her, laying down there with no air, waiting for her father to finish having sex with someone he thought was her...laying down there with those thoughts she must have been thinking...knowing that her own father wanted to have sex with her, and she had to trick him into believing he was getting what he wanted, so that she could be (somewhat) safe from him. How lonely and disgusting she must have felt. She laid on the bottom of the pool, on her side, with her eyes wide open, staring at nothing.

What gets me though, now that I'm awake, is that I didn't entertain a single thought about MYSELF in this situation. First off, what on Earth was I doing having sex with a man? (That question is easy to answer: I was doing what I always have done - atoning.) And second, how on Earth did I convince myself that it was ok to put myself in a position like that? I mean, this man thought he was having sex with his own daughter, for the love of god! For all intents and purposes, I allowed myself (OFFERED myself, even) to be a victim of incest.

This dream, as crazy as it sounds, actually makes perfect sense. The night I had this dream, I was feeling very much like a "bad little girl". I hadn't done anything wrong, exactly, but something I had done that day had inadvertently hurt someone I care deeply for...and I went to bed with unresolved feelings of guilt and shame.

When I first realized that I have never been attracted to men, my first thought was, "well then why did I have sex with men all these years? How did I justify that, without being attracted to them?" The answer is painful. As a child, I had no control over my own body. I had no choices, and people used me for whatever they wanted. For my mom, I was a punching bag. For many of the men in my life, I was a sex toy. In my little-kid-mind, the way that translated was that men could do whatever they wanted to me, and I owed them that. I recall times in my adult life when I felt obligated to have sex (which, honestly, was pretty much every time I had sex...but there were a few more obvious times that fit in here). At one point, I had a friend who was deeply lost in his addiction to alcohol. Each night, I would get on the phone with him, and have phone sex. I would stay on the phone with him until he was too tired to go out and drink. I felt that I owed him.

I'm not sure why I bring up that story...it illustrates the point, but I don't feel like I can define WHY exactly. I feel like I'm rambling...which I don't like, but since this blog exists for me to work through whatever I need to work through, I guess I'll accept it.

Anyway, back to the dream...I'm sure another time I can explain better why I feel (felt) obligated to have sex with men.

So, the basic gist of what I got out of this dream was that I was feeling like a bad little girl, and the way to make myself "good" again was to agree to have sex with a man. Ugh...I feel like this post is just insane, rambling, nonsensical...and like I totally missed my point. But I'm leaving it as-is, simply because most of what I'm writing about right now comes from a place where I'm still a child victim of sexual abuse, and I probably just don't have the words for it all yet. I totally understand what I'm trying to say, and maybe one day I'll actually be able to make it make sense outside my own brain...but this will do for now. It kind of has to.