Redreaming

"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams." ~Elias Canett

I am shocked. Last night I had the most disturbing series of nightmares. Like everyone, I have those occasional "gosh, I'm falling" or "back in high school with no homework" dreams. They're mildly disconcerting, but easily filed as too much stress that day at work, or perhaps lactose intolerance.

Last night was different - really different. Last night was a cluster fuck post-trauma catharsis of childhood weirdness. They actually came in two distinct waves. The first was a rapid fire succession of tiny details of growing up Nazarene - traveling and ministering and being Jesus' minion. Minute cortisol-glutted memories wrung from the washrag of my REM like so much soapy water. Some were real and recognizable. Others were just terror constructs. There was no story, no sequence, no morning after tale to tell. There was only a discharge of images that eventually woke me - literally in knots, my entire body tense and aching.

That was at 3:00 a.m.

I'm often awake in the middle of the night. I have been a night prowler since childhood. So my pup joined me in the family room for a little diet coke and attempt to regroup some psychosomnolent stability.

Okay. I'm all right. That was weird. God I'm sore. Breathe deep. I'm exhausted. Back to bed.

And it happened again. Apparently whatever psychic Draino that had attempted to clear my sleeping affect had failed to detonate completely, because there was a LOT more.

Round two was all about demons and Gothic torment, again curling me in on myself like a convulsing fetus. It was a lot of fun.

I'm pretty clear about what set the table for this mind-fucking feast. Of course, I had a very stressful evening. I've recently taken a parish job as their organist and choir master. I am following a carnal old bat who had been there since the patron saint of the church was a toddler. She died. Everyone I talk to says she was caustic and inexorable. Yet upon her passing, they now venerate her like the love child of Mother Teresa and Virgil Fox.

Last night, they decided to let me have it. Full frontal, no holding back. I simply don't play like their beloved Betty did. They don't like this, and they don't like that. Trust me, I heard Betty play - and it is a total compliment that I DON'T play like her.

The specifics of their cannibalism are less important than their archetypal significance, a primordial manifestation of so many Jeebus people who are just assholes. And it caused millions of such experiences with church folk to shoot out of my dendrites like Scud missiles, bombing my sleep with their latent trauma.

And so I'm shocked. Just when you think that you've diluted the deleterious persistence of memory, you go nighty nite and wake up in a Dali painting.

I have no one to blame but myself really. I know the formula. I know the result. Put some old ladies, vapid and embittered, in a setting where they get punch drunk on the power of Jesus, and they will cut you. Always.

Every. Single. Time.

Bitches.