MadamAurantia

For starters, it should be noted that my mother and I have a very complicated relationship. She was rather abusive, though rarely physically. Out of the six daughters, two have cut off contact with her to protect their children. Three have become just like her. I maintained contact because I'm the last one to want to speak to our father, who Mom tries very hard to turn all of us against. They're still married, but she treats him like she used to treat us. It's a mess.

As part of this relationship, Mom pressured me to get into another abusive relationship when I turned of "marriageable age." She wanted a good, Christian son-in-law that would keep me "accountable" to God. That lasted 3 years, without marriage, before he decided that I was too masculine. I was two months from my marriage to my current husband before Mom took Fiance 1 out of the family album. This is all necessary to understand my dreams, I promise.

I used to lucid all the time, even managing an OBE a few times. I don't lucid as much anymore, and hardly ever OBE. Annoyingly, both Mom and F1 show up in my dreams far too often. When F1 used to appear, I'd wake up and my husband would be bruised and scratched from my thinking he was F1 and trying to fight him off. After a couple of years, this stopped happening, and eventually he stopped appearing. Unfortunately, last summer he contacted me again wanting to get back together. He's married, and knows that I'm married too, but... yeah... He started reappearing after that, about once a month.

Mom used to show up once or twice a month, always turning the dream into an emotional nightmare. No fear, really, just lots of pain to wake up with. Often, the dreams include a big blowout that I've been expecting for years, the one where she finally disowns me for good. Or she does something new and I start screaming all of the things I've wanted to scream for years but couldn't.

This Thanksgiving, she insisted for months beforehand that we had to come spend it with them. My husband couldn't miss his family's dinner and I didn't want to, so we spent one night. This was the first time I'd been under their roof overnight in 5 years. She was alright while Dad and Hubby were nearby, but as soon as they were gone she turned sadistic. Things so small that I couldn't really complain without looking like the bad guy, but calculated to hurt.

Since then, every dream has been entirely centered around her. I can't lucid, I can't have any dream other than dealing with her. It's been a horrible drain. I haven't been functioning awake like I used to, and at the end of the college semester that's not good. The campus shrinks are no help, the last time I went to one they decided that I was suicidal. I'm the last to know everything, aren't I?

Anyway, to the dreams. There were 2 sleeps today. The first one was the usual nocturnal, with the addition of someone who used to be in my dreams all the time but not in the last year or so, and is slowly returning: my husband! Yay!

We were all graduated, and had just moved back to Southern IL, where Hubby's family is. It's only a few miles from where I grew up, though the parents moved away long ago. We were living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, felt about halfway between Benton and Thompsonville (Oh, Deja vu. I've dreamed about typing this before, I think... that happens often...). We had a pet duck and a monkey, for some reason. The monkey liked to play in the forests around us, and I had wild berry bushes nearby to munch from. My grandfather was alive (died over 10 years ago), and helping us get settled. We had just unpacked, and were getting everything arranged. There was something about driving on the gravel road to get there, it's very vivid... I remember, we were sad about something happening to someone close to us.

No, Granddad wasn't there, but my father-in-law was and was called Granddad, but we didn't have children yet. We were coming home in his old pickup (how I know it was him), with the news that Hubby and I were going to be taking care of a baby only a month or two old. Her parents were close to us, but something had happened and we were fostering her until they could take care of her again. In retrospect, I do note the absence of two if our RL friends who we have planned to live with after graduation and who may or may not be a couple. It may have been their baby? That would explain the "Granddad" thing, the male friend is practically another son of his.

When we get there, I have a handful of (very red, and sweet) berries and let my father-in-law taste some with me before going inside to prep an impromptu nursery. I find my mother there, she came down to help, and she begins trying to convince me to send the baby away: "You should hold her for a while before you decide. (WTF does that mean???)" "Are you really willing to donate what this baby will need?" "What baby could possibly be happy with you?" etcetera.

I try to ignore her as best I can, then leave the nursery to find myself in the house I grew up in, right outside my bedroom door. I wander over to the sofa, and see an empty binder. I don't know the binder IRL, but I know it as a makeshift photo album that used to be my school binder. Finally, staring at the binder, I tell her "I will be SO glad when you move out, you are so f***ed up!" This is the last thing I remember before waking up.

My husband works graves, so we rarely get to share the bed. After a few hours, I took a couple of Benadryls to sedate me and went back to bed. I had just watched Inception, and found this site, and wanted to see if I could lucid. Benadryl has a hallucinatory effect on me, but I don't want sleeping pills in the house. I'm depressive, and it just doesn't seem safe, you know? Silly me, should have used mugwort.

I remember my older sister, Mary (One of the Mom clones), living with her boyfriend Tom. I was with Mom, Dad, and my little sister, Shawna (Another clone, but much more sympathetic) visiting her. They lived to the north of my hometown, a couple of hours away. I think Salem, but it was a ritzy subdivision in the woods. She can't afford that IRL. I think the car we were driving was the green Taurus station wagon, which we got rid of in... '99? But I was an adult in this dream, married though Hubby was elsewhere at the time. I think he was back south with his family.

We stopped at a gas station I've seen many, many times in my dreams since I was young, a mini-truck stop. I don't know it IRL, but now it was in Mount Vernon and we'd stopped there many times over the years. Now I know where in my dream geography it is. We stopped to eat, a greasy spoon diner, where Mom made all sorts of jabs at me that I don't remember while Dad stared at his food and Shawna tried to ease the snarks by laughing back at Mom.

I left the table, seeing a newspaper headline that Mary had bitten Tom and the police were looking for her. I bring the paper to the table, saying that it must have happened after we left (though how the paper was printed that fast is kind of screwy), and I see Mom holding up a half-empty foot-tall salt shaker shaped like a juice bottle. She yells "Your salt intake is high! You're pregnant aren't you?" She's ecstatic, but making fun of it in front of the whole diner. I finally snap, and start telling her off that my cycle ended a week ago (not irl, of course), I hadn't had sex since then, and if I WERE pregnant it would be none of her business and she wouldn't be involved in any way. There's more yelling, and I wake up.