Sand
One night, in the autumn of 1997, I found myself in a poorly lit basement of a dream:
The basement walls were cold and dank. But I bad little time to speculate.
The concrete crypt in my dream was collapsing. I turned my heels. I looked for an escape.
My mouth began filling up with black sand. Black sand pushed through my lips.
Black sand pushed up toward my nostrils. I fought to breathe against black sand rising from me and pushing through me.
The harder I struggled, the faster black sand crept until I had no breathing space left.
I began to cough bard, trying to dislodge the black sand suffocating me inside,
I coughed so violently that I woke up from the dream.
I sat up on the thin mattress on the floor that I used as a bed, choking and gagging, trying to catch my breath.
I was frightened of this dream that had pulled me awake.
I did not know this would be the beginning of dreams that would grab me by my collar to shake me, as if trying to wake me from a self-induced emotional coma.
Secrets and anger were stagnating, rotting and finally becoming poisonous.
The basement of my mind could no longer hide secrets.
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Captive
I dreamed that
I was held captive along with other people in a room.
When I tried to open the door to escape, one of the captors - a woman- grabbed me and began dowsing me with gasoline.
I feigned death so she wouldn't bother setting me on fire if I were already dead.
But she lit a match and set me on fire anyway.
I felt the warmth of the flames, but the flames did not burn me.
August 1998
When I became brave enough to leave the relationship, he sensed it too.
I made the 4 hour drive north and crossed the border. But I didn't know how to bring up the subject.
The weekend drew to a close. On Sunday night I told him the true purpose of my visit.
He said that he was not surprised.
He said that if I were to leave, he would starve himself to show me how much he loved me and needed me. He said that he was prepared to persevere even if his hunger strike put him in the hospital.
He was the kind that would carry out such a threat. I agreed to stay past the weekend.
Then I stayed another day. I would wait in the apartment for him to return from work.
One morning he went to work. I tidied up the apartment for something to do. I organized the magazines on the table and washed the dishes.
Then I picked up my pace. I stuffed my clothes into a bag. I removed photographs of me. I carefully swept up every strand of hair that I may have shed onto the floor.
I locked the door and drove to his work. The receptionist knew me and greeted me warmly. I gave her the key to his apartment. She said that he was in the back office and I could give him the key myself.
She cheerfully went to tell him that I was there.
I turned and ran out of the building and ran into my car. I started the car and didn't stop until I came to border customs.
Once I drove across the border, I never looked back.
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Vortex
I dreamed that...
I was living with my parents and brother in a two-story house with an attic.
My room was up in the attic. I decided to kill myself by swallowing pills.
The pills made me sleepy and numb.
My brother came by the attic, saw what was happening, and said, "Mom, Jane's killed berself!"
Then the world and the house began to crumble. A man - I sensed he was a friend-tried to drag me out of the collapsing house since I was sluggish from the pills.
I found myself underwater, caught in a vortex created by an unseen sea monster.
Suddenly I was fighting with my senses, wanting to get out of the vortex
Because I did not want to die.
August 1998
At one point, I had moved out of the room I shared with my brother into an enclosed back patio area that was meant more for storage than for a person. I taped the glass panes of the double-door with black paper. I no longer wanted to be seen within my own family.
When my parents suspected that I would really leave home, they broke their rule of not talking to outsiders about what's happening in our family.
One day I came home from school to a group intervention. My parents had found a group that aimed to stop children from running away from home.
These (American!) teenagers each tried to convince me that staying home was the right thing to do. Their stories all sounded the same to me: they ran away from home, they learned the gravity of their decision, they felt regret, and they realized that their parents loved them.
Then I had to get into a group huddle with them.
I was so angry at my parents for doing this that I could barely spit out the words, "this won't work!" at them.
This unseen sea monster this depression I didn't know exists inside me was pulling me faster and further into its depths.
I've almost accepted my severance from the world, symbolic of the pills I'd swallowed in the dream. I almost didn't care if I'd make it, if I'd escape the vortex that had grown beyond my understanding.
If it weren't for helpers who tried to reach me the guidance counselor with Brown Dark eyes, the therapist I called Dr. M - death would have been a certainty.
Because I used to live only for my parents, when I closed my heart to them, I had nothing else to live for.
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Status
I dreamed that...
I was standing in line. A nurse was taking people's "status cards" from the line.
I realized that I did not have my status card.
I started to step out of line to go and look for my status card.
The nurse saw me and said, "Ob, don't worry; I have your card already."
I followed her pointing finger and walked to the pile of status cards where mine was on the top of the pile.I did not look at the card but I knew what the status said.
I turned to the nurse and said, "I cannot accept the fact that I bave cancer."
September 1998
Shortly after I began "talk therapy", I guarded myself from sharing too much about my childhood. I already had a label - a medical diagnosis (more accurately, a medical misdiagnosis by a psychiatrist).
I dutifully went to each therapy appointment. I was one in a line of people who dutifully went to their therapy appointments.
I never saw a person in the waiting room that would cause me to pay attention. On a rare occasion, I saw a child emerging from a room. None made me gape or gasp. I didn't see anyone that I'd say, "He needs to be here, because he is so obviously crazy!"
On the surface we looked "Normal"..
But our façade may have been built on a delicate web of denial that ensnared our souls.
Still, I was there to talk about my very adult problems! I had my very official "status" diagnosis, hadn't I?
I grew tired of the psychotherapist's attempts to get me to talk about my childhood. I knew what she was doing. I knew where she was pointing. I wanted to thwart her objectives. I wanted her to fail. Until one day.
I said, "I cannot accept the fact that I have been abused."
With my utterance of the word, dialog began.
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Treatment
I dreamed that...
There was a small, white furry animal that looked like a mix of mouse and rabbit.
It was injured, its bind leg jutted out abnormally, its hind paw looked swollen and split.
I knew that if the animal did not receive treatment, it would not only be in pain but it would eventually die.
A woman with dark wavy hair appeared and she was someone I knew in the dream.
The woman said that something wrong with the creature. She turned the animal over on its back. She used her fingers to press down near the base of the animal's spine, near its tail.
Blood dripped out from the animal's eyes and mouth and the animal remained still as if it were dead.
I stood nearby, but was able to "feel" the bones of the animal with the woman's fingers as if they were my own fingers. I felt her pressing down on a nodule as if pushing a dislocated limb "back in place".
The limb swelling disappeared.
After treatment we put the animal upright, back in its place, and it was all right.
September 1998
Dr. "M" told me that wounded animals in dreams may symbolize the wounded self. The two animals that the wounded animal resembled in my dream, rabbit and mouse, were small and defenseless, just as I was once a small and defenseless child.
For me to trust a therapist again was a breakthrough.
A couple of years prior, I had gone to a counselor to "sort myself out". This was someone I randomly picked in the yellow pages of a phone book for counseling and therapy.
When I showed up, the counselor administered questionnaires. He scored the results of my questionnaires and said, "Jane, these results make me feel very sad."
I didn't understand what he felt sad about. If the questionnaires ever revealed that I had clinical depression, I never knew it. The counselor didn't suggest that I see a psychiatrist for further evaluation.
Instead, the counselor said that I had a lot of fears that I had created from my mind. Then he took out a pocket knife, flipped it open, and slowly approached me. He said that his aim was to show me the difference between fears born of true physical danger versus fears born of illusion.
But I no longer felt safe with him. I didn't go to the next appointment. When he called me to ask whether it was something he did, I lied and said no.
If Dr. "M" were the woman I knew in the dream, this was my willingness to be vulnerable with her, to allow her to help me "heal" myself.
So that together we can drain the emotional poison.
So I can finally start to heal..
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Remodeling
I dreamed that...
We lived in a house in the countryside, surrounded by a big field as our yard.
The roads around us were unpaved mud and sand. There was greenery all around.
The rooms of the house looked familiar, these were the same rooms from the bouse we lived in when my parents owned the motel.
But my room was being "remodeled". My room was in a constant state of remodeling.
Even though I knew this was supposed to be "my" room. the room was ahvays being worked on.
It was always being fixed and I could never use it.
October 1998
My parents told me that they were working hard to make money so I could have a better future.
When I was eight years old, money for my better future led my parents to have such ugly fights that one day my mother took a meat cleaver and threatened to chop off one of her fingers on the cutting board.
I cried and shouted, "I'd rather be poor than to see you both argue like this every day!"
When I was ten years old, money for my better future led my mother to work so obsessively that she needed emergency surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst. My father left me and my brother for a few hours because he had to go to the hospital to give blood to my mother's transfusion.
I thought I was going to lose my mother. I was so scared that I couldn't even cry.
When I was twelve years old, money for my better future led my parents to leave for work before I woke for the day and come home after I had fallen asleep for the night. I withdrew into a world that became too small to include my parents.
When I was fourteen years old, money for my better future led my parents to move me for the third time in the two years since we'd first immigrated to the U.S. I'd gone to a different high school for my freshman, sophomore, and junior year.
This time, I'd had enough.
I'd had enough of the "money for my better future".
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Dog
I dreamed that...
A black dog kept coming into our house.
My mother and brother tried to get rid of it. They said it belonged to "someone else".
But the dog would snap at them when either tried to touch it.
The dog wanted to settle in a particular corner of the bouse.
I knew I could tame the dog. I said to the others not to touch it because it will bite them.
I gently petted the satiny coat that was at once deeply black yet brightly reflective, as if the coat was made of strands of bematite.
I felt the creature grow calm and quiet under my caress.
I led the dog outside, away from our house.
But it kept coming back to our house, to settle in the same corner, wanting my attention.
October 1998
I believed that family secrets only belonged to other families. I believed that family secrets won't exist can't exist if I pretended that they don't exist.
But a family secret is a faithful dog that will keep coming back. Family secrets claim their owner and are tireless in their forgiveness of their owner's denying them and disowning them.
No matter where I go and who I try to be, family secrets showed up in those different places, sometimes wearing different clothes but always showing the same faces.
I thought these family secrets relentless pursuit of me is to inflict pain on me.
When in truth, family secrets came to relieve me from my pain.
"It takes a lot to break a dog's spirit. Its ability to love, even when abused, is tremendous. Its spirit and willingness to love and be a companion is great... Dog knows its home ground."
Animal Speak: The spiritual & magical powers of creatures great and small by Ted Andrews (1952-2009).
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Accountable
I dreamed that...
I had to pay rent and I went downstairs with cash.
I knocked on the landlord's door and an elderly Asian man answered. I counted out cash for rent payment.
My mother came by and asked me for \$40 to buy wonton soup for lunch.
I said, "No, I don't have enough for rent if I gave you this!"
My mother backed off and I felt bad. With the little money I had left, I told my mother that I'd buy her something to eat, and we left for the market.
October 1998
My father could not find work in the U.S. and the motel business was failing.
In 1993, he went back to Taiwan to look for a job. My parents had bought rental properties in upstate New York with borrowed money and operated those properties on more borrowed money.
When my parents could no longer find money to keep paying mortgage, they stopped trying. They knew that foreclosure was inevitable and they thought they would let the banks take care of it.
When banks could no longer find my parents to keep sending delinquency notices, they stopped trying. They knew where I lived and they thought they would let the daughter take care of it.
I was living in Buffalo, New York. I was a new graduate student. I spent weekdays going to classes and studying in the library. I spent weekends driving to Ithaca, trying to find a solution for my parents.
I could not find the property managers who took their cut of fees from rental payments.
Debt collectors called me early in the morning. They rang my phone all day and I stopped answering the phone.
I couldn't eat and I couldn't sleep and my hair was falling out.
I was living off student loans and I used some of that money to pay for repairs of apartments that I was not legally responsible for.
I wrote a letter to my parents. I said that I didn't have enough money or energy to survive if I tried to fix their financial problems.
My parents said that I could stop trying to solve their problems. But they couldn't stop the banks from trying to make me be what my parents couldn't be: accountable.
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Façade
I dreamed that...
I went aboard a cruise ship with girl, a companion who was younger than me.
She had dark straight hair that was cut in a bob and she looked naive and innocent.
At the dock, the ship began to sink. People scurried about, belping evacuate passengers who had already boarded.
The girl bad bidden berself among a flock of penguins nearby. I went over to where she was biding.
I saw three men going to look for the girl - her lover, brother, and father.
She came out of biding and walked alongside them, looking sheepish and a bit embarrassed.
I said to the girl, "Three men came to look for you but no one came to look for me."
May 15, 1999
I was walking out of a training meeting with my coworkers at the conclusion of the day. I and another female coworker had arrived that day, so we each carried our luggage from the airport straight to the training site.
One of our male coworkers offered to help the female coworker with her luggage. No one offered to help me.
For years I wondered if it was because she was more feminine than I was. For years I thought it was because I did not appear feminine enough or behaved feminine enough to elicit feelings of chivalry from others.
It wasn't that I obsessed over this one specific incidence. This incidence was a template for many incidences throughout my life where the same thing happens: if I were with another female, my companion would get offers for help. I would be left alone to carry my own belongings or solve my own problems.
For the longest time I thought I'd been forgotten or invisible.
Eventually, I understood why people acted the way they had acted around me.
They didn't offer to help me because I acted like I didn't need any help.
I acted like I could do it all myself.
No one came looking for me because I acted like I didn't need to be found.
I acted like I was never lost..