Thread: Need a little help.

Last night I had a nightmare that woke me in screams.

I was in a home with a lot of people in it. It was palatial and grand, made of stone and brick. The passageways were all expansive and flowing so that rooms seemed to simply melt together into one giant never-ending space. There were lots of people in the background, and despite it's expansiveness the home had the feel of many damp and dark corners. My son was there somewhere, and at one point something got broken. I only heard it, I didn't see it, but everyone was looking for someone to blame and my son ended up being the one.

*my son is 12. He lives far away, we were tragically separated two years ago under horrible and unjust circumstances.

Everyone sort of came together in a hallway that opened up into a courtyard that looked kind of like a turn of the century industry town in France or England. It was sunny and amongst the architecture there was springtime growth and flowers. Although it was the home still, this space was somehow connected to school, and the people that had assembled spoke like school admin. Demanding answers for the breaking of public property, being very heavy about it. One woman turned on my son and asked him if he was going to be responsible for the damage he did. How was he going to pay for it? My son was laying on a short brick wall by the side of the street/floor of the hallway, that blocked off a culvert of shallow running water. This was the first moment in the dream that I saw him, I have not seen him face to face in two years, and the sight of him stirred so much emotion. I wanted to run to him and put my arms around him and hold him close to me, to touch his face and feel his realness. I wanted to talk to him and hear him laugh. I wanted most of all to take him away from there, away from these people, to someplace safe where we could be happy in peace.

Rather than answer, my son started doing the wet noodle. That blank stare took over his face and he flopped about like the child he is. In his dramatic response he fell off one side of the short brick wall into the culvert. I ran to see him, screaming for him, and as I came to the wall I could see his body beneath the water being sucked up by the current into a mechanism under the bridge. I ran to the bridge. I was dimly aware of someone beside or behind me trying to soothe my fears with words of kindness, but I didn't hear them. I saw a large manhole cover on the bridge moved aside to show the working parts of the machine underneath and my son's little legs sticking out of it, the sound of machines running. Then the blood flowing everywhere from the other side, red, red blood. A waterfall of blood. I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and the whole dream world stood still while I did it, I screamed and the dream refused to dissolve, I was just there with the blood alone.