My Recurring Dream...

There is a recurring dream that I have had since I was eight and it goes like this:

I wake up completely surrounded and engulfed in darkness. I cannot see the outline of my body or even see the palms of my hands when they are right in front of me. I call out, "Hello, can anybody hear me?" but there is no response. Panicked, I begin to yell at the top of my lungs for what seems like hours but all I am greeted with is silence. My walk turns into a nervous run trying to find someone, anyone, that will acknowledge me. I don't find them.

Realizing that I am completely alone, I slowly curl up into a little ball and start to quietly sob. While I'm in the fetal position I can tell that this feels horribly wrong. My throat hurts from calling out and it becomes painful to swallow. Then the tears flow down until I cry myself to sleep. When my eyes open, I am still trapped in the darkness but in the distance I hear what sounds like static from an old television set and with my hands in front of me I follow it to what feels like a tv screen.

As I touch the screen I see the salt and pepper static appear on more than one tv. There are many televisions stacked on top of one another in a five by five pattern that all show the static. An image begins to materialize in front of me and I see people that I know in my life. I get a smile on my face and feel relieved to know that I am not alone. But something was wrong. I was calling out to them but they weren't responding. They were going out of their way to ignore me acting like I wasn't even there. Every screen had a different person that I knew on them and yet they couldn't see or hear me. Some of my friends were talking about me; some good and others bad. I got to hear how jealous they were of me, how they didn't want me to succeed and secretly hoped for me to fail, how petty they acted over the things that I did, and how no one ever really liked me.

All I could do was watch and listen to the people whom I'd considered family talk so badly about me. I was horrified that they could be like that... which made me think that I was truly alone in this pitch black world. Sometimes the screens would change to others that I knew but I would be at a higher angle as if I was watching from a tree branch. Many emotions went through me as I soaked up the information that I was being presented with: I felt cold and numb wanting to disassociate from this place and the people that I was watching. I felt absolutely alone and unloved. I wondered if this was my own personal hell; the things that I feared the most.

Never do I get a response to that question, just more images of people on the screens talking badly about me. Even the people that I helped out said that they just used me because they knew that I wouldn't say no to them. I cried, screamed and shouted out into the emptiness to make it stop but it keeps on going. Endless loops of people that have come and gone into my life and how they honestly felt about me. Being on the outside and constantly looking in was something that I dealt with all my life. I thought that these people whom I'd consider friends and family accepted me... but they really didn't. They just placated to me giving me just enough to hold on to the illusion of being my friend.

Over the years the dream/ nightmare changes... I see people I know but I am just observing them in their everyday lives. They aren't talking about me; but there is no mention of me anywhere at anytime from them. Sometimes I am an older woman in a black cloak watching all of the screens, keeping an eye out over them like a guardian angel. Something always remains constant- Always alone and in the dark without any light except the screens. Once I tried to use my energy to light up the darkness but it was swallowed up. Another time I called on the wind element within me to rage forth and suck in all of the darkness, but the darkness was never ending.

The majority of my life has been me trying to be myself and having others accept me for it. Truth is the more I became myself the harder it became for others to like me. If I shine brightly I cast shadows on others which brings out the worse in them. It hurt a lot hearing how people viewed me; but the hardest part was that I cared about these people who couldn't give a crap about me. I didn't want to care about what others said about me, but it was hard trying to keep my head held up high when my heart was crying out in pain because I wasn't accepted by the people that I was surrounded by. People mattered to me more than I let on and when I had to experience that loneliness and the feeling of being alone again I refused to do so. It isn't that I want to care about how others think of me; but everything that was said about me had a way of hitting me in the face unexpectedly.

This dream showed me that no matter what I did in life people were going to talk about me and not accept the person that I wanted to become because that meant that these people couldn't control me which scared them. It revealed that my path is a solitary one that was void of any kind of "light" no matter how much I called out for it and needed it- I was forsaken. I had to learn to rely on myself and not care about how others think of me. That the one thing that I wanted at the time, to fit in, was being denied to me in order to show me that no matter what I did I wasn't going to fit in. Friends were nothing more than people's representatives; masks that they tweaked in order to mesh with me and I fell for it because I wanted to finally have people close to me that I could share my hopes, dreams and feelings with.

Looking around now at my life that dream has continued to be accurate in many respects which saddens me. The people have changed many times on the screens, but their cores haven't; and I keep choosing the same types of people to be around even though they are completely different than the previous people I decided to share my life with. Some, I've learned, are just better at hiding their true cores than others. I have very few people in my life that will pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth. One person hears me but still if I share too much I get turned away yet when the shoe is on the other foot I am expected to hear everything without fail. I guess that kind of hypocrisy doesn't go away. People still talk badly behind my back and if I am lucky they do it straight to my face... I am still bothered by it but I tell myself to consider the source and move on in my life.

I've had to learn to walk alone; not to rely on others to help me, and not to share things with people because they don't understand. The only comfort I have are the words that I string together on paper or a computer because keeping a journal is just too sad for me to re-read. But in a way this recurring dream has given me the strength to walk my own path steadily with one foot in front of the other. Helped me find my inner strength to be unaffected on the outside by what cruel things others can say about me. Then calm myself down internally when what they say is false by telling myself that I know the type of person I am... this dream aided me in preparing myself for the life that I needed; not the life that I wanted, in order to be the person that I had to become to survive this world.