Nightmarish dreams mean dead can continue to play mind games

By David McElroy · April 2, 2019

My dreams have become nightmares lately — and I don’t know why.

Both of my dead parents showed up in dreams last night. My father was trying to manipulate me. My mother was abandoning me. It’s as though both were playing the ugly roles I expected from them.

It was as though something in me was using their departed images to taunt me — as though something was pointing an accusing finger and saying, “See? Nobody really loves you. You don’t deserve to be loved.”

There was even a basketball game later in the dream at which I was turning blue — and I felt shame at people seeing me like this when I had come to see a woman — but I’ll start with my parents.

My father always used money to manipulate his children. Back when he had a lot of money — before we knew he had embezzled it — he would sometimes buy lavish gifts for us, but those gifts came with implied price tags. As long as he did things for us, we were required to obey his whims.

He especially liked it when one of his children had a crisis. He could swoop in and “rescue” us while humiliating us with shame. I learned early on that it was in my best interests to just endure the shame and take his money. That’s why it was such a shock to him later when I wouldn’t take his money — because it came at too high a price.

In the first part of the dream that I remember, my father had called me. Even though he’s dead — and I knew in the dream he was dead — he had some way of bestowing money on me from the afterlife. He was telling me how pathetic I was and how much I needed his help.

I felt panicked to hear him saying those things. I found myself thinking that I didn’t really have a crisis and I didn’t need his help, but he still made me feel shame.

Later on the same night, there was a server in a restaurant — a place which I’ve never seen — who I apparently knew well from having come there a lot. She was an older woman, but didn’t seem elderly. I was feeling horribly low when I was sitting at a counter in the restaurant. I felt lonely. I felt as though nobody would never love me.

Then this server came over to me and handed me a thick envelope and told me to open it after she left.

As she walked out the front door, I opened the envelope to find a lot of money, along with a note saying that she was really my mother and that she had taken this job just so she could secretly watch over me. But she had to leave, the note said, to save her own sanity. So she left the money — maybe a few thousand dollars — and disappeared.

I cried when I realized who she had been. I wanted to tell her that I had wanted her love and her presence, not her money. But she had abandoned me.

And then there was a basketball game. It was a women’s basketball game at a small college gym. I don’t know where it was, but it was somewhere around here — maybe Samford University or something about that size.

I was there to find a woman who was one of the players, because I loved her and wanted to tell her so. The game was going on, but I was having trouble making my way through the crowd to get to the court. Then I realized — to my horror — that I was turning blue.

If you’re familiar with photography, you might know what it means to “white balance” a photo. To oversimplify a bit, it’s a process by which you adjust the color of the light in the picture to make it look more natural (or to give it a special effect). If you make an error in your white balance, a picture can easily look too yellow or too blue.

I noticed myself in a mirror and realized that my hair had a blue tint to it. In that moment, I realized that I had somehow “color corrected” myself incorrectly. I was slowly turning blue. It started with the tint of my hair and then my skin tone.

I felt deep shame. I knew that people would soon start noticing and making fun of me. I knew that I couldn’t face the woman I loved looking like this, especially as the blue tinting got worse, because she wouldn’t love me like this.

So even though I had come so close to my love, I felt ashamed that I looked this way. I felt she couldn’t love me. So I turned around — even though I was finally so close.

As I walked out of the gym, the blue was getting worse and I heard people talking and saw them pointing. I was humiliated and left.

I know my parents aren’t really playing mind games with me. Something in myself is playing mind games based on my greatest fears about them.

My father was still trying to buy my attention and obedience. My mother was still abandoning me without ever being able to give me what I needed from her. And I was once again getting painfully close to the love I needed — and then fleeing in shame because I didn’t think she could love me.

For me, this is all related. Even all these years after childhood ended, I’m still dealing with the trauma of childhood. (I’ve known for a long time that my sisters felt similar ways, but I’ve discovered in the last year that others in the extended family had suffered from some of the same dysfunction.)

It’s as though my parents unintentionally set up a mechanical ride through a horror house — the kind in which you glide along in a moving seat and scary things pop out when you least expect it — and I’m still getting onto that ride at times and moving through its horrors.

And the worst of its horrors is the climax which screams, “Nobody can love you!”

Do I have to keep going through the ride until I learn how to respond differently? Or can I learn not to get onto the ride? I have no idea.

I only know that I have to get over the shame he pushed on me and the unworthiness I felt because she left. Otherwise, I’ll keep turning myself blue and falling short of finding someone to love me.

I need someone to prove to me that the horrors of this old ride have been lying to me all along, but I don’t know how that can happen.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts