It’s been almost 40 years, and still they come.
They don’t happen near as frequent. These days, they maybe come a couple of times a year, just a little reminder from the deepest recesses in my vast memory bank that it’s still out there.
When they DO come up – wow, does it shock the system.
I was your typical kid growing up in the 70’s. I had the occasional nightmare, as all kids do. It caused me to jump out of my bed and make my way in the darkness to mom and dad’s bed, where there was the known security of my parents to keep the monsters in my mind at bay.
That all changed in the spring of 1976 – when I was sexually assaulted.
Those silly little nightmares about monsters and scary people chasing me in my dreams became full-on night terrors. I dreadedgoing to sleep at night. I’d beg to stay up and watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and even The Midnight Special on Friday nights . . . anything to avoid going to bed and battling the visions that were going to come, no matter how hard I tried to stop them.
Even the act of getting ready for bed was an exercise in insanity. Our bedrooms were upstairs, but I could recall my attacker’s last words before he let me go: “If you tell anybody, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
I could picture him bringing a ladder that was tall enough for him to gain access to my room on the second floor. One window looked out to our spacious yard. Another was positioned over the back part of the house, where an addition had been built. The roof to the addition was low enough, I reasoned, that my attacker could climb up there and break through the other window in my room.
Because of that possibility, it became a nightly ritual for my parents to have to actually inspect my room before I could feel comfortable enough to sleep in it. They had to check the closet. They had to look under the bed. Sometimes, they’d have to look out the window to make sure nobody was there. Only when those inspections were completed to my satisfaction, could I finally feel a sense of security that I wasn’t going to be attacked in my own room.
The problem was – nobody could secure what would go on in my mind once sleep came. There was no way anybody could stop me from being attacked from the inside.
And the attacks would come – almost on a nightly basis. Sometimes, I’d wake up from a nightmare, get up to get a drink of water and shake off that memory, then fall back asleep and experience another one. I wet the bed so often that my parents had to put a plastic cover over the mattress, saving them the frustration of having to try and clean a urine-stained mattress over and over again.
It was always tough for me in those early years, because the attack happened in a small town of less than 1,000 people, and my attacker was the older brother of a classmate. I’d get a daily reminder of what happened to me every time I walked into school. I doubled my pleasure (sarcasm alert) during the second semester of sixth grade when my attacker was assigned as a teacher’s aide for my PE class. Talk about having to LIVE your nightmare – when I walked out of school the first day of the semester, shaking and in tears, my mother wanted to know what was wrong. When I told her my attacker was now my teacher’s aide, it unleashed a fury that I’d never seen out of my mom.
We moved from that town after I finished sixth grade, but I wasn’t able to leave the nightmares behind. They followed me to our new home, and it took a while for me to become comfortable with having a bedroom in the basement. While my parents’ bedroom was directly above me, there was a window in my room looking up to the outside, and I had many a nightmare involving my attacker tracking us down and coming through that window. I’d have to inspect my closet almost every night before I went to bed, and I looked under my bed more times than I care to count, thankful each time to see nothing more than the red carpet that my parents put in my room.
Moving away to college, the nightmares seemed to subside. I started drinking and experimenting with drugs around that time, and I guess I’m not sure that they ever happened on the nights when I was loaded on some intoxicant. I do remember, though, that the nightmares would still pop up – sometimes they even involved other people in my life. Family members, friends, other adult figures – they would all make appearances in a variety of roles, from being an onlooker to actually being the one chasing me.
These days, the visions and faces seem more like a blur. I’m not sure if it’s because the action is happening so fast, or time is fading some of those visions, or if maybe the memory of the experience is losing its punch in the process of experiencing these nightmares. This most recent nightmare found me back in that place – on an old, rickety bridge with chipping, faded white paint located behind the local swimming pool, face down with my pants at my ankles, with a garbled, unintelligible sound serving as my attacker’s voice. I remember the colors of that evening’s setting sun piercing through the trees, which were just starting to show their spring buds on branches that reached out, as if they were hiding the rest of the world from the horrible crime that was taking place on that bridge.
I’m not sure what I was more frustrated with when I woke up from this latest nightmare – the fact that it happened, or that it was 2:30 in the morning when I was awakened and couldn’t fall back to sleep (this blog is being written at 4:45 a.m., more than two hours after the nightmare). I’m grateful that I don’t have to experience these nightmares any more often than I do, and I’m hopeful that the day will come when this particular nightmare never comes again.
It will never undo the fact that I was sexually assaulted – but I’m looking forward to the day that I won’t have to re-live the experience in my dreams again.