Recurring Nightmare
In a recurring nightmare, someone unwelcome, uninvited, and dangerous tries to break into my home. It is always daytime, a shining, exposing sun more sinister than the privacy of darkness. I lock the front door, then slide across the tile floor of the family room in socked feet to lock the back door. But there’s another front door, the one we never use, and I race the intruder to it, pushing arms out of the doorway to force it shut and lock it. And then what happens? Stuck in the house, afraid to leave. Crippling anxiety about the unknown trying to force its way in and me with no known escape route.
*
At my parents' home – not my childhood home, but as warm and welcoming as that one had been – an intruder knocked on the door during our Independence Day picnic: my children's father, with whom I was still in a relationship, wanted to take the kids to his parents' house, about two miles away.
He didn’t yet know about the open Children and Youth Services investigation on him from when he failed to hydrate our one-year-old daughter on a hot, humid day at the end of June. When he returned home that night, he handed me a crying baby. She has a rash, I said, and stripped her down. A flat, red heat rash covered her from scalp to toes. Her diaper dry. No tears, despite the crying. The milk I pumped for her, still in the fridge. So inconsolable she couldn't latch to my breast. I dialed the on-call nurse, who told me to keep trying to breastfeed her and to call her doctor in the morning if she still wouldn't drink. With a lot of calming care and cuddles, I got her to breastfeed and fall asleep. It wasn't the first time he'd forgotten her milk. CYS advised me to maintain primary custody until they could fully investigate.
I opened the door but joined him on the front porch instead of letting him in. You can't take the kids, I said, and he shouted: you don't own them, you can't keep them from me. He called his dad and yelled that I wouldn’t give him the kids. I backed away, re-entered the house, shut and locked the door.
He knocked, but when he realized no one would let him in, he put his finger on the doorbell and left it there.
Inside, our three-year-old son repeated to my brother: don't make me go with daddy, don't make me go with daddy.
My mom asked more than once if I locked the door. Yes, I said, and I slid on socked feet across the kitchen floor to the back door to lock it, too. What about the door downstairs? We don't keep that locked, she said.
As I descended the stairs, I felt like I was living my nightmare, racing the intruder to the door. I wondered if I’d have to push his arms out of the way. If I’d feel trapped when locked in. But he was still at the front door, ringing the doorbell, which echoed across the basement floor. I locked the door.
Police on their way, he texted, but my brother had already called them twenty minutes earlier. The police came. They saw that the children were safe. They told my children's father that he was trespassing and that he needed to leave.
*
The Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams states that intruder dreams are usually about a specific person. There is no specific person in my dream, though, and I can’t determine who would want to break into my childhood home. The dream encyclopedia also describes childhood homes as symbols of boundaries and a place to go to feel safe. Seeing a childhood home in a dream is an opportunity to reflect on our basic beliefs about home and family. For me, home and family have always been safe and comforting. But according to the nightmare, something or someone is trying to penetrate that safe haven, creating a boundary between love and fear.
*
Afraid to go home, I spent the night with the kids at my parents’ house. My niece was at the beach with a friend, so I set up a pack-and-play for my daughter on the floor of my niece’s bedroom and shared her bed with my son. In the morning, I sneaked into the adjoining bathroom to shower before the kids awoke. The hot water did not loosen the tension in my neck. While towel drying my hair, I heard my daughter crying, but also something else, something muted by the closed bathroom and bedroom doors and my daughter’s wails. Wrapped in a towel, I exited the bathroom to hold and soothe my daughter, and then I heard it. The doorbell. The doorbell. The doorbell. The doorbell.
I cracked the bedroom door enough to see down the hallway, to the front door, where the kids’ dad stood with his finger on the doorbell. It wasn’t yet 7:30 a.m. My brother, wearing only boxers, told him to leave. He left just before the police arrived, after he had already been there ringing the doorbell for over 20 minutes. The police said they’d charge him with trespassing, but they never did.
In the moments after my kids’ dad and the police left, my mom helped the kids eat breakfast, my dad retreated to his office, and my brother, who was supposed to be at work, sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, waiting for the strength to move again, reliving the traumas that he had just escaped from with his daughter’s mom, someone who exhibited the same behaviors as my kids’ dad.
I wasn’t surprised my kids’ dad had returned. He is relentless. Asking him to stop fuels him to keep going. What most disturbs me now is that I wasn’t as disturbed as the rest of my family. I had grown accustomed to his relentlessness. His lack of boundaries. His abuse.
*
In my nightmare, the trespasser lingers nearby, though I still don’t know what it wants or who it is. I know I can’t stay trapped in the house anymore, so when I see it move to the backyard, I escape through the front door, opening it inch by inch so it doesn’t make a noise, doesn’t show much movement. And then I run. Sometimes I have bare feet, sometimes not. Either way, I always reach a point where I cannot run anymore, usually when I am only a few houses down the street. It feels like being trapped in molasses, my arms and legs weighed down with sticky syrup. But my determination for safety and freedom prevails, so I kick up my legs and start swimming through the air. I have never known if that is an effective getaway tactic because I always wake up then, my heart pounding in my ears.
*
My lawyer advised me to file for a PFA – protection from abuse, a restraining order – by calling the county’s domestic violence crisis hotline. I spoke with an advocate who asked me a lot of questions, first about his trespassing, and then about our relationship history.
Has he ever stalked you?
Has he ever isolated you from friends or family?
Has he ever blocked or restricted your movement?
Has he ever physically harmed you?
Has he ever threatened to kill you?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…but, but, but, but, but…I clarified and minimized each incident to the advocate. It was mostly cyber stalking, reading my journals, browsing history, and private social media messages, though I had seen pieces of paper on which he wrote down my every movement in the evenings that I wasn’t with him. He tried to keep me from family and friends in the most subtle ways, like scheduling trips for us on days I had already made plans or sending inappropriate messages to my family members to cause tension and drama. He laughed when he walked crooked to knock me off a sidewalk or off a trail in the woods. He laughed when he stuck out his butt in our narrow kitchen to prevent me from leaving. He laughed when he bit my shoulder, stuck his fingers in the sore part of my pregnant belly, spit food in my mouth when pretending to kiss me, poked my cuts and bruises, pushed me over the arm of the couch while I was pregnant. Any time I changed my clothes, he came running from wherever he was in the house to watch me, even if I asked him to stop, even if I tried to lock the door. He broke my favorite bowl, my favorite pasta pot, my favorite cup with Smurfette. I used to think these were accidents. He never out-right threatened to kill me, but he did describe in detail how he would kill someone, if he wanted to, and how he had access to the right tools. He described it while we ate dinner together, the night after I had asked him to move out, but he wouldn’t.
“Are you frightened?” asked the judge at the PFA hearing.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, he has access to over a dozen guns, and his aggression has been escalating the past few months.”
I walked out of the courthouse with the temporary PFA for me and my children. A domestic violence advocate called me that evening to let me know that he had been served, his guns had been confiscated, and he had been evicted from our home.
*
In the dream and in real life, I keep the intruder out of my house, but the intruder’s pursuit continues. The dream encyclopedia suggests that if you’re being chased in a dream, you should stop, turn around, and confront whatever’s chasing you.
I’ve never done that in my recurring nightmare. I’ve never known who or what was chasing me or why or where they came from. I don’t even know if I ever escaped.
I confronted my intruder in real life. I know who it is, why he chases me, and where he comes from. I still don’t know if I will ever escape.
-Dr. Anne Greenawalt
Dr. Anne Greenawalt is the founder and editor-in-chief of Sport Stories Press. Her writing has been published by Pithead Chapel, Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, Autofocus Lit Mag, Words & Sports, WOW! Women on Writing, and others. She’s a freelance writer and the grants director for a nonprofit in Pennsylvania.