Nightmare on Divorce Street
I was standing in a dimly lit room beside her. Her daughter was there too. I could hear her voice in the distance. It was summer and we were whispering. Why are the lights off? I remember thinking. We stood beside a closet, with doors that looked like an old window shutter. My voice was shaky as I spoke to her. I could hardly hear my own words as they left my mouth and hovered in the tense atmosphere between us. I was then standing on a dirt road outside the home in a long, white summer dress. I was among tall pine trees. Blue sky peaked out between their limbs. The terrain beneath my bare feet was slightly rocky. Loose bits of gravel. And I looked back over my shoulder and saw him. He was a few feet back, and slowly retracing the outline of my footprints. He was coming and I could not run. I opened my mouth to speak and no audible words formed; not even a whisper.
The sound of my 5:30 AM alarm jolts this nightmare into present day reality; the sweaty pajamas and racing-heart reality. This was new. Nightmares of this capacity, with former life characters and fears, were very new.
I drove to work that morning, white knuckling the steering wheel and replaying a now fragmented scene of me in a bedroom with my ex husband’s affair partner. I could not remember the details of our conversation. I remember feeling incredibly tense. And whispering. And then I saw his face. The gravel road moving beneath my feet. The grip on the steering wheel tightening as I nearly run a red light.
My nightmares in the months post divorce ranged from being back in my marital home and wandering the hallways alone, to having a seamlessly ordinary dream and my ex-husband uninvitedly showing up and demanding I needed to come home, to seeing but being unseen in the middle of him and a woman as they laughed over dinner and wine. All of them ended the same. The abrupt coming back to life in a pool of sweat, heart racing, and five minutes of grounding in the physical space that was actually in front of me, and not still sifting about in my memories.
The nightmares would come in waves. Similar themes in recurring episodes would appear, and then disappear as quickly as they came. Surely they were triggered by more challenging days on my healing journey. When I met my now partner and we crossed the intimate bridge of sleeping beside each other, he would witness the aftermath of the nightmares on occasion. My now partner, a therapist by profession and a calming, confident soul by how God made him, introduced a therapeutic exercise one day that can be used to alleviate nightmares. Though he gave a fair warning the exercise may feel unnatural and silly, I was desperate for the haunting to dissipate.
I tore a piece of paper out of my journal, gathered a few highlighters and different-colored pens. He told me to draw my nightmares, and the characters that resided in them, as absolutely absurd as possible. He told me to draw anything and everything that comes out in my nightmares. My old house. Affair partners. Draw all of it as absurd as possible. Over-sized shoes, odd hair, obnoxious physical attributes. The use of color then locks in the experience of seeing that absurd image in the brain. I would look at my drawings before bed, like a child reading their favorite picture book. Sometimes I would laugh out loud. And it worked. Praise God, it worked.
As I move into different phases on my healing journey, the nightmares have resurfaced. I turned to my now partner one evening before bed, half venting but also half eagerly wanting an explanation, and asked, “why didn’t I have these nightmares when I was actually in the story?” He took me in his arms, as he always does in these moments, and said, “Because you were living it, baby…you didn’t need to dream it.”
So much of what I was living then exerted power over me. Power over my cognitive and conscious thoughts. My emotional amygdala all the way up to my reality-seeking frontal cortex. There was no space for the nightmare I was living daily, in 8 hours worth of subconscious dreams. But now, a dramatic shift in my life has occurred. My concerted, conscious baseline is to be regulated, boundary-filled, self-soothing, calm, and trusting, and I suppose my subconscious has shifted to becoming a playground for repressed or unprocessed memories that lie dormant in my DNA. I would need to cleanse my subconscious. I would need a continued reframe for the nightmares.
One of the last drawings I did was a road that ended at the edge of the page, but I decided it wasn’t actually ending. It was just the part of the road where my brain currently had access to. I named it, Divorce Street. The opposite end of Divorce Street twisted and turned as it ended on a hill at the top right corner of the page. The hill was high, resting in the clouds. This hill held my dreams. I labeled the dreams with names, places, and experiences, and placed them inside of closed circles. Each dream had a color. A fence enclosed the top of the hill. The fence enclosed my dreams. I decided my dreams could float up to the clouds and dissipate, but could not leave the fence and travel the road. And at the far opposite end of Divorce Street, the end that wasn’t an actual end but landing at the edge of the page, I drew me. Two faces, morphed into one solid body. One looking up to the hill and the fenced-in dreams, and one looking to the edge of the page. The edge representing more healing is coming, but I just can’t see it yet.
Both faces are smiling.
Because they are no longer nightmares.
They no longer have the power.
They are simply dreams.
