Wistala's Journal

I have always had very vivid dreams (mostly nightmares), and many of them have come true, including the first Space Shuttle accident to 9/11 to the deaths of two people close to me.  Other dreams are symbolic - apparenly like "regular" people.

Years ago, I had two dreams of being raped, spread out over a course of months or years, but very vivid and physically painful.  In both dreams, I was raped in a parking area, outside, where other people should have been around to see and stop the attack.  They were so vivid that I still remember not only the man's hot hands on my arms in one dream, but also the gravel and rocks pressing into the back of my head as I was thrown down in the other dream.  I've always worried that they may be precognitive, and they themselves caused flashbacks for a short time after each one.

Lately I've been experiencing anxiety more than I ever did before, and have been trying to work through that.  Inadvertently, I think that brought a breakthrough which involves the dreams.  I realized that my precognitive dreams always occur within 6 months prior to the event.  These obviously weren't precog, then... so they had to be symbolic. 

Breaking them apart, I discovered the key lay in the fact that both rapes were in such public places, but that no one had been near enough to see or help.  This was a perfect analogy for how I felt about the abusive rectal exam I suffered at age 11, followed by the vaginal exam at 13 that retraumatized me. Both occurred in what should have been "safe" places, with other people around, but no one other than me had felt like a terrible event had occurred.  To others, they were just exams... no one could see the damage the first one was inflicting on me physically, and the doctor himself denied that I was feeling any pain.  The second doctor couldn't understand why I reacted hysterically (flashbacks were pretty much unknown then) during her exam, and refused to stop when I begged her.

All these years I felt horribly violated by both doctors, yet never considered myself worthy of feeling that way, since I hadn't actually been raped.  So many other people have actually been raped... and here I was feeling this badly about something routine?  The dreams were my subconscious way of saying, "Hey, I HAVE been raped here. Even if no one else saw it or believed it, it was rape to this body and this mind." 

 That realization was a sudden, unexpected relief.  These dreams which had troubled me for so long don't bother me as much now, and I am taking time to comfort my inner child and recognize her pain.  Rape comes in many forms.... and so does healing.