NBF's DJ

I haven't posted here in some time because of concerns about my being in the entertainment industry, where you're in danger of becoming well-enough known that any of your Internet postings are summarily outed. I was advised to stay off the Internet as NavyBlueFlower. I'm back on now, inspired by the immortal words of Dr. Emmett L. Brown: "Well, I figured, what the hell?"

Background to the following dream segment: I'm a lifelong sufferer of OCD. It's been diagnosed, but never directly treated. I am approaching 50. My therapist believes I'm an early-arrival Indigo Child.

Sounds about right to me.

The dream segment: I wake up in a house in England. I don't know the area. It's the home of a friend of my sister's, probably in Wimbledon or thereabouts. I have no idea really where I am - I've just been shuttled over there. I wake up and it's just before sunrise - and I feel a malevolent, sickly-evil presence in this room! I can't see it - I can feel it as if it were an invisible oil slick creeping and hovering through the air about me - an oil slick made of thought. Terrified, I try to turn on a light - but the lights aren't working. I jump out of bed and tear through the house - none of the lights are working. It's pitch dark. I run out of the house and down the street - the sun's beginning to come up and the pre-dawn twilight is softening the world. Birds are chirping shyly. The presence stays in the house.

The next thing I recall is being in the house next to the presence. It's about to enter me, but I muster all my thoughts and point them at the thing, and it balks. It rolls away. Victory.

Trouble is, it enters into the head of my 93-year-old grandmother. (She was 93 when she passed away in 2003. She'd be 101, had she lived 'til today.) I can't prevent it from doing her harm.

I know this dream has to do with my OCD. My OCD has to do with fear of loss of control, fear that things will hurt me and I can't do anything about it (except come up with childish "magical" rituals to prevent it), and "butterfly effect" anxiety that everything I do must be very specific or it may cause harm. This ties directly into fear that if I push evil away from me, it has to go somewhere, and it might harm someone I love. Which is directly related to the Christ-complex I had as a little child, that I'd be a good person if I took on as much evil as I could just to take it away from the world and save everybody else the pain. That, my toddler self felt sure, was a sure way to earn my ticket to heaven!

This dream may have sprung from my recent re-examination of that old belief - and my tentative wonderings that I may not be responsible for others' happiness, and that I may DESERVE good things to come my way in this earthly life and they WON'T bar my way to heaven. Obviously there'd be a lot of fear associated with a change like that in one's thinking.

Or... was there really a presence?....