A bully picked a fight that night — and now I’m dreaming about it

By David McElroy · April 23, 2021

I didn’t get into fights when I was a child. I never picked on other kids. I was taught to walk away from trouble if I could. So I almost never had physical confrontations.

But there was one Sunday night — when I was about 12 or 13 — when a small-town bully left me no choice. I hadn’t thought about that confrontation for a long time, but I’ve dreamed about it repeatedly lately. I’m not sure what my unconscious is trying to tell me.

I was spending a week with a friend who lived an hour or so from my home. His father was the pastor of Oakman Central Baptist Church in the tiny town of Oakman, Ala., so I had been to the church several times that week. And there was a bully there — a slightly older kid — who seemed to think it was great sport to pick on the visitor.

Sunday night was going to be my last time at the church for that week. I was going home the next day. And it was after the Sunday night service — on the front porch of the church — when the bully pushed me one last time.

If you’ve ever spent time in smaller churches, you know there’s a period after the service when many people are still standing around talking. Then the groups start breaking up and one family after another heads for home.

I was on the front porch as the social period was winding down. I don’t know where my friend and the various members of his family were, but I was among a group of young teens at the front of the church. And the bully was among them.

I have no idea what he said, but he was verbally taunting me at first. He was baiting me. He got closer and closer to me as he taunted. I realized uncomfortably that other people had backed away from us. He was poking his finger at my chest and mildly pushing.

I made the sudden calculation that I couldn’t avoid this fight. Without forming a plan, I suddenly threw myself into the bully. I pushed him back — and then I launched the most savage punch that my right fist could manage. I hit him so hard that he staggered backwards and then fell to the ground. I braced for his counterattack.

Instead, he ran away.

I was terrified afterward that I was going to be in trouble for hitting somebody. When adults were summoned, I had to explain what had happened and others backed up my version of the story. For awhile, nobody could find the bully.

The adults grew concerned when they couldn’t locate him, but someone finally found him — in a crawl space under one of the church buildings. He had gone there to hide. He was still crying when someone found him.

I didn’t get into trouble. In fact, not much was said about it. It turned out that the kid had a reputation as a bully, so the unspoken attitude among the others seemed to be, “He got what he deserved.”

The event wasn’t formative in my childhood memories. It’s barely even a footnote. I can’t remember the last time I had thought about it until recently — when the story started playing out again in my dreams.

In each of the dreams, I experience the same panicked feeling of being backed into a corner. I feel like a trapped animal who doesn’t like his choices — and suddenly has to choose the “least bad” of the available options.

And each time I dream about it, there comes a moment when I violently lash out with caged fury — and the bully runs away from me.

Each time I have this dream, I wake up with the odd instinct that it represents something in my life right now. I wake up feeling as though my back is against a wall and that I’m about to have to take a wild chance to strike back against something I’ve allowed to oppress me.

And every time I feel that way, I have that same triumphant feeling that I’ve vanquished the bully and I’ve broken free. It gives me a feeling of liberation and relief each time.

I don’t know what it means, but it feels significant. It was just last week when I was writing about being unhappy with my life right now. And this somehow seems related to all of that — in a vague way that I can’t quite put into words.

I feel as though my back is against a wall. I feel as though I’m running out of time. I don’t quite know how to fix things.

And something tells me the time is coming — in a way I can’t yet understand — when I’m going to have to take a tremendous and scary gamble.

Maybe I’m fooling myself, but deep down, I have a feeling that whatever “bully” is holding me back today — metaphorically speaking — will run away if I suddenly spring into action and knock him out with one mighty blow.

These dreams have reminded me to be proud of my child self — who came through when he had to — and it makes me feel that I’m going to do something similar when I need it most right now.

I hope I’m right. Something needs to change.

Share on Social Networks

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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts