Cliffnotes: Waking Nightmare

Working on a cliff notes version of the original, which is locked away.

14 June 2018

September 28, 2015, I was overwhelmed and exhausted.  Embarrassed that I was wrong about certain things happening the day before and more embarrassed that I scared my family.  My friend Emma came over.  I wanted to share some of the things that I had learned.  I will say this:  there is some portion of the manic that is legitimate.  Your brain is going a million miles an hour and you process everything and see significance in little things that are, in fact, important.  I was wearing a red shawl with the tag sticking out.  The brand: Anxiety.  She pointed it out to me and laughed at the irony.  She also told me that she could see that I was on the edge of a break and I needed to sleep.  I hadn’t been able to wind down in days and I believed her.  I wanted to go immediately to start the process, but she wanted to talk to me more and perhaps convince me which, when you’re going a million miles an hour was frustrating that it seemed she was dragging it out and making it harder to actually follow her advice. 

I did everything that I could to de-stress, relax and get into the right place so I could fall asleep and get the rest I so desperately needed.  Lavender under the tongue, warm bath with Epsom salts, soothing music, a scented candle.  Husband brought me the baby and stripped him down so that we could be skin to skin while he nursed in the bath.  Husband sat on the edge of the tub to supervise. 

The problem was that I did fall asleep.  My consciousness fell asleep but my body kept going without me.  There are blank spaces of what happened and I experienced the next three hours as a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. 

I went off on wild tangents pulling in books, movies, biblical history, previous dreams, all went into the soup of what I understood was going on.  Themes were: I thought that we were filming a movie in the temple and I was Eve, but I had to be kept in the dark in order for the performance to be believable.  I had to burn all of my journals.  I had to say the right key word.  If I could just get out the front door, it would open into Narnia and we would escape this world and be happy.  I tried to make a break for it several times but could never get past Husband.  I had to scream towards the sky (think movie: 5^th element) to stop something bad.  There was a lot of screaming.  I thought I was trapped in Husband’s nightmare and I started slapping him trying to wake him up.  I jumped around on the rug onto different letters thinking that if I hit them in the right order a portal would open up.  I thought I was possessed at one point and begged Husband to cast it out.  Which when he attempted to I collapsed to the floor in another blank space.  Between blank spaces I found myself lying on the floor and I tried smashing my head as hard as I could through the tile to escape.  Husband put his hand behind my head.  The police finally arrived and I thought the officer's badge number was significant and so I demonstrated sufficient "out of it" when they arrived for me to be handcuffed for my own safety and transported to the hospital.  On the way out of the house, barefoot I saw several parents looking horrified and shocked that their day care provider was being hauled away in handcuffs.  The bishop and his wife arrived and I called out for help.  He looked mortified.  I called out to Lovie's mom begging her to tell them that Narnia was real.  She responded, "Better go with the officer, Cookie."  

In the back of the police car is when I "woke up".  I realized I was fixed in place.  I couldn't just pass through the window and escape as if it wasn't there, as I might be able to in a dream.  It was real.  The realization was horrific.  I also realized in that moment that I didn't have my garments on and was wearing all black (because it was the closest clothes that Husband could grab).  

The episode was over but the delusions persisted for a while after.

I don't want to remember.  I don't want to keep re-living this over and over again in my mind.  I'm hoping that writing it out will give me a safe place to keep it so that I CAN forget.

Update:  After writing the original episode out in all of it's horrific details, I shared it with Husband.  He told me that he had forgotten 90% of it. It was hard for him to listen to it over again.  Re-living it.  I don't know if understanding the internal dialogue helped him understand it any better or not.  He listened for my sake.  To help me.  He's strong like that.

I've been re-living it for the last 8 months.  Every day.  It's probably why I still remember so much of it, even with the gaps.

And since writing this all down I've finally been able to let it go.  I don't dwell and spin on it EVERY DAMN DAY.  Since writing it out I hadn't re-lived it until it was time to go to therapy again.  And I was reminded again why I have to go.  Because of the episode.  But it was ONCE in a whole month and not once every day.

I'd say that's improvement.  And so I'm just going to leave this here and walk out.