There’s been an abnormal influx of dreams in my brain lately! Within the past few days I’ve had quite a few. One of the ones I had today (I had two, I’ll save the next one for tomorrow) was rather distressing. My father has never beat me before, so I have no idea as to what tick in my subconscious (if you subscribe to the belief that dreams are communiqués from the subconscious; I personally don’t know if I believe that or not) caused this.
It’s a well known fact in my family, each member of which mercilessly teases one another, that my father can dish it out but can’t take it. I’m standing in the kitchen, while the rest of my family is in the living room sitting on the couch. They’re ganging up on my dad, poking fun at him about some little thing, and he begins to get frustrated and tries to come back with a rebuttal (just as he does in real life). After seing him so vexed, I jokingly say, “Aww, poor widdle daddy!”
For some reason, this infuriates him. He gets off of the couch and comes into the kitchen and throws me to the ground. He then repeatedly begins to smash my head into the tile floor. I try to tell him to stop, and that I was only kidding, but within seconds, I black out. I wake up (in my dream) in my bed. It takes a minute to remember what happened, but when I do, I get very angry. I go to get out of my bed to confront him, but when I try to stand up I immediately fall down. Not being able to walk, I crawl out of my room and into the hallway. “Dad!” I scream. “Dad! Why would you do this to me!?” I start to cry.
I look up and see him standing in the doorway of his room. He starts to say something, but I can barely hear him. My mom then walks out into the middle of the hallway and tells me I shouldn’t have said anything to him.
“Why did you let him do this to me?” I ask her.
“You really shouldn’t have,” she starts. I think she’s about to tell me that I shouldn’t have been disrespectful, but she finished with, “hit her like that. That’s wrong.” She was looking over her shoulder talking to my dad, who was still standing in the doorway of his room.
“She shouldn’t have said anything to me,” he says in his own defense.
“Mike, it wasn’t that big of a deal. You shouldn’t have hit her like that.”
“Okay,” my dad says. “Maybe I did overreact.”
“Why don’t you go give your dad a hug?” my mom says. (Every time my dad has seriously hurt me in real life and felt sorry for it, he would always hug me and I would forget all about it.)
“No!” I shout. My dad begins to walk down the hallway with his arms spread out.
“Come here,” he says tenderly.
“No! No, no, no!” I turn around and try to crawl away. Then I wake up.
