Thunder only happens when it's raining
dreams, nightmares, and the weird in-between of dead people visits
I’m running up the back road that leads to my childhood home. It’s a private, dirt road that stretches for a full mile, all uphill. County plows don’t come up here when it snows. The police don’t come here on patrol. If you call emergency services, it’s volunteer first responders before actual trained medical professionals.
I’m running up the back road. The dust is kicking up around me. I’m breathless, but I can’t stop. He’s behind me. I finally get to the house and enter through the back door. I run around to the front door and lock it. I lock every external door and make sure the garage is closed and I lock the door to the garage anyways. It’s pointless—he can walk through walls anyway.
My childhood home sits on top of a hill. It stretches before me like a distorted funhouse after I lock all the doors. I hear him entering the house through a distant door that I somehow forgot to lock. I take off running again. I have to get to my room. I run up the stairs to the second floor.
I get to my room and slam the door behind me, throw the tiny little lock on the doorknob (there is no padlock), and close the door to the Jack and jill bathroom I share with my sister. I look out the window. I heard him enter the house but he’s somehow also outside it. My window looks out to the front of the house, to our driveway.
He’s in the driveway. He’s in the house. He’s somehow in multiple places at once. I can hear him coming up the stairs to my bedroom and I can see him outside, clad only in black with a big hood and carrying something sharp. I can’t keep looking at him. But if I look away, then he’ll definitely get into my room.
I can’t hide under the covers, either. If I do that, then a jaundiced-yellow specter will hover directly in front of my eyes and above me like the bent-neck lady, but this one will also have small tubes coming out of him and a hydration tower next to him like sick people have in hospitals.
I’m trapped until I wake up.
Waking up isn’t much comfort. The hooded, black-clad figure isn’t explicitly chasing me around during my waking hours, but my brain hasn’t really cottoned on to that. This recurring nightmare will visit me most nights throughout my junior and senior year of high school. The stress of the nightmare will mean that during the day I still feel pursued, as if I’m Hermione Granger being hunted by a basilisk and I have to look around corners with a mirror.
Only I don’t have the perspective of a reader and I have no idea if the terror is ever going to stop, only that it shreds my nerves every night and isn’t much better during the day.
That whole looking around corners with a mirror feeling reaches a fever pitch one day during my AP US Government class. I feel like it’s getting harder to breathe during the class, and not really for any good reason. I try to ignore the feeling and focus on the class. It doesn’t work. My throat feels smaller and smaller the longer the feeling carries on. I start to get lightheaded. I raise my hand and tell the teacher I need to go to the nurse’s office because I think I’m going to pass out. I don’t tell him that I am pretty sure I am dying.
I go to the nurse’s office and try to describe the feeling to her, but without much success. It’s pretty difficult to form coherent sentences when you are dying (or at least, when you think you are dying).
My mom picks me up from school that day and we go visit my primary care doctor. My primary care doctor tells me that I have had a panic attack.
This news sort of makes sense to me, but almost doesn’t really register. I’m chased by a man in a dark outfit who’s carrying varieties on a knife every night and I’m not totally sure that he’s not also chasing me around during the day. Panic is a normal response to the situation that I’m in.
We go home from the doctor and I tell my mom about my dreams. She pauses for a few moments after I tell her the details.
“We need to do something better about your nighttime routine then,” she says.
I halfway tune out at this point. She’s sang this song before. When I was a kid, before my dad died, I had nightmares as well. Those were different. They were still somewhat pursuit-themed, but were much more explainable under the umbrella of children with an overactive imagination.
But now I’m 17. Dad’s been gone for a few months. We’re out of the work of having a family member with advanced cancer, and instead my siblings and I are in individual therapy a few times a week and going to weekly group therapy an hour’s car ride away. I’m thinking about college applications and my future and what’s going to happen when I leave Evergreen. I am convinced the problem of my nighttime torturer and my daytime panic is going to follow me wherever I go.
It’s pretty hard to see the bigger picture at 17, and in general when you’re recently bereaved.
After my mom is done expounding on what I could do better about my nighttime routine, she switches to musing about why I am having such vivid, repetitive nightmares so often. She is convinced that adding prayer, Bible reading, and hymn singing into my nighttime routine will stave off the nightmares. Maybe she’s right? But at this point my view of God is shifting to a capricious deity who sees humans as fundamentally evil and in desperate need of saving (aka, Calvinism), so part of me thinks I may deserve this torment.
“You know,” she muses, “more and more I think we are living in the last days. The Bible says that in the end times, your young men will dream dreams and your sons and daughters will prophesy. You might be having prophetic dreams.”
And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.
-Acts 2:17
Even at 17, even though at this age I am currently still deeply religious, this explanation doesn’t satisfy me. What kind of prophecy is God trying to give me with a hooded pursuer every night? What message is he trying to send? Is this just my trial and my cross to bear? Is everything that my family and I have been through with my dad’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death just…expected?
If my dreams are prophetic, they are a message from a very cruel god who somehow sees the need to continue to flex his power over me even though I already think he has ruined my life.
In my mid-20s, I took the most practical (and, as far as we know), psychologically sound approach to understanding my active dream life. Conversations with therapists and psychiatrists alike led me to explanations that felt reasonably satisfying without making me feel worse about myself.
A psychiatrist I saw in college heard me explain my nightmares in high school to her (which decreased in frequency in college). She took a full inventory of me and told me that I was experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in high school. Reading the symptom list was very clarifying. I wasn’t crazy at all, nor was I being punished. Many people who experience traumatic events (especially when they are young) tend to have extended periods afterwards of feeling like their life is in imminent danger and they must be hypervigilant to account for that. Exactly how I felt during my period of intense nightmares.
Other dreams that I had (either about my dad or something else), I took to explaining as “random neural firings”, which is how most psychologists will explain dreams. There isn’t really a good evidence-based way to interpret dreams or connect them to your real life, outside of stress and random life connections.
At this stage, specters vaguely resembling my dad have more or less stopped appearing in my dreams. I can’t say the same for specters resembling my mom—but that’s a different story.
My dad has started showing up in my dreams more normally now. It’s been nearly 14 years since he died, and for the past 3 or 4 years or so he’s just been showing up in my dreams as if he’s calling for a visit. It’s quite vivid, and it’s generally a really great experience.
Occasionally his visits will be really sad because I’ll wake up forgetting that he’s dead. That’s never fun.
But, a lot of the time, he’ll just come to me in my dreams just to visit. We’ll go out to coffee or a meal, and I’ll update him on my life. I’ve gotten to tell him all about my fiancé, our cat, the house that we bought, my career journey, how my friendships have shifted and changed, how much I still love to ski, how much I love camping now, the times that my sister and I have hiked the Camino together, how much my sister and I love Spain, the list goes on. He doesn’t really tell me what he’s been up to. In the dream, I generally assume that’s because I couldn’t understand what the afterlife is like, and I don’t need to understand it.
I’ll wake up from these dreams with the feeling of satisfaction you get after a catch up with a long lost friend. It feels great to tell him what I’ve been up to, and he feels genuinely curious and interested in what I’m doing with my life. I miss him when I wake up, but I don’t usually feel the same cavernous loss that I have in the past. I know he’ll be back to catch up with me again eventually.
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Not the hymn singing and prayer to process cancer trauma 😅 Also, love the basilisk reference, maybe you were processing the fact my pet snake escaped in the house