My mother, who is sitting down around the corner and just out of view, tells me that she had found a letter I wrote to Jimmy in his bedroom. “You mean MY bedroom,” I said, correcting her angrily, and it wasn’t in the tone of a question. I felt possessive of my room and angry that she’d intruded and read the letter. She leans from around the corner to look at me, sort of smiling but saying nothing, as if I’d given her the reaction she was after. So I go into my old bedroom (at my parents house), and some things are still in there. An old dresser with drawers missing and a lot of old writings that I stuff into my book bag to take with me.
It may or may not have been part of this particular dream, but at some point I’m kissing a girl — or rather, what we’re doing would be kissing if either of us had opened our mouths in the midst of our face-mashing. It was “dry-kissing,” I suppose, which would be the lip equivalent to dry-humping. I used to have dry-humping dreams quite frequently, and over time I came to the conclusion that it signified my fears of intimacy despite my simultaneous desperation for it.
Interestingly, interpretations of the more detailed dream resonated with the apparent meaning of this one.
My mother may represent the Jungian anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche who traditionally guides us through difficult periods. Given the rest of the dream, however, it may have more to do with the fact that my mother and I didn’t really bond in my youth, and in fact fought fairly consistently.
Bedrooms allegedly represent aspects of ourselves that are private and hidden — personal thoughts, emotions, and issues we don’t wish to reveal or discuss. With respect to our childhood bedroom specifically, this suggests that something in our current waking circumstances triggered hidden memories from our childhood.
Understandably, a bedroom intruder is supposed to symbolize a sense of insecurity or fear of trusting people. Given a lot of my insecurity and trust issues likely originated with my relationship with my mother, this may be quite fitting.
While writing in general represents, for me, trapping a moment in amber through self-expression as well as catharsis and psychological alchemy, writing a letter is supposed to represent the desire to establish a connection with someone — Jimmy, my childhood friend, apparently. Yet I didn’t send the letter, but rather left it in my old bedroom, which again, suggests a fear of making such a connection. So again, all signs point to: trust issues and fears of intimacy.
One element of the dream I have yet to understand, however, is why she called my bedroom Jimmy’s bedroom — and why I so angrily corrected her, feeling so possessive of it. My only thought is that she was implying that I was taking on his pain as my own, and so the private, secret, childhood matters my bedroom represented were more his than mine despite the fact that I’d taken them on.
Actually, having written that out, it makes a good deal of sense.
I met Jimmy when I was maybe five years of age. Our mothers worked together at a day care and given we were both the same age and both rather shy, they thought we would hit it off as friends. And we did: in no time I came to consider him the brother I never had.
He had two brothers and a little sister and, at least for awhile, I would often visit him at his house, even sleep over on occasion. The way they lived was quite different than in my own family. All the kids lived in the same room, took showers together. For a time, they had no television, and only had so many toys that they could store in a relatively small chest. Most of all, his parents were insanely religious — and the father was incredibly abusive. I would hide beneath a bed or behind a door, unable to defend my friend and his siblings from their father, who would beat them right in front of me. Most haunting of all was the image of the young sister, a blond and petite girl, face red, wet, and twisted into an expression of absolute terror. It’s haunted me for years.
For years I had buried all memories of Jimmy, and when they emerged in flashbacks back in high school (along with many other, far more bizarre memories), I even questioned if I had made him and those circumstances up.
As it turns out, I had not.
One of the questions that plagued me and, honesty, made me feel guilty and ashamed since remembering it all is why it should effect me so strongly. After all, it didn’t happen to me, so what right do I have being traumatized? It was similar to how I felt regarding how I felt about my relationship with my mother in childhood: I was never physically or sexually abused, so many others have been, so what right did I have to complain about how cold and dismissive my mother was towards me in my youth?
Only when I deduced that I was a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) prone to involuntary empathy did it begin to make sense to me. How I’d described myself as an “emotional sponge” all those years finally had some rational footing.
When I met Angela in my twenties in the fast food joint where we worked, I was quite taken by her, and when I learned of the abuse and mindfuckery inflicted upon her by her parents — really, her fucking family as a whole — I became very emotionally involved. I began having haunting dreams about Jimmy, his family, and most specifically his father around that period and it was all too clear to me what triggered it.
So what triggered this most recent dream?
Well, the evening before the dream was the birthday of my ex-girlfriend, Claire, who I stopped talking to a few years ago. After getting drunk, I started having a text conversation with Angela, who I associate with Claire (which was also revealed in the dreams I had when still working with Angela) as well as Jimmy.
So Claire’s birthday likely triggered me texting Angela, which in turn triggered the dream regarding Jimmy.
In addition, either yesterday or the day before, I considered adding the story of Jimmy to my book on strange, often apparently paranormal experiences. He was associated with at least two strange experiences in my childhood, though we never talked about it and those particular memories, unlike the others regarding him, are nearly impossible to verify as accurate. As it turns out, Angela has also had strange experiences all throughout her life, but like so many, she chooses to ignore them.
In any case, the dream seems to have been exploring why I keep my distance from people and remain afraid of nurturing connections despite my desire to.
Chronicles of a Madman. 