Because I can

Based on an entry from my journal, dated June 20.  Censored, of course, and greatly expanded (because I can type more before losing interest than I can write).

I think there exists in the human condition--or at least in my condition--a longing for something like a heroin addiction.  A severe mental illness.  An abusive parent.  Something to unify the events of life, to give them a theme.  Something to blame for all the unhappiness.

I have a guardedness to me that perceptive people notice very quickly.  Maybe not perceptive people.  Unfiltered extroverts--the sort of people who fling very personal things at me.  They notice that these things hit a wall.  A more substantial wall, it seems, than the one everyone has.

An online aura test (ha!) said I have a "red overlay," a sort of psychic shield that is developed in response to childhood trauma.  To my knowledge, I have no such trauma, but I want to believe that I do.  So I wonder if I have repressed memories.

I do have one potentially traumatic memory.  I was on a floatation device on the lake where some family friends have a house, out deeper than I could touch with my dad and some other adults.  This when I was very young, and unable to swim.  At some point I rolled over and fell off my raft, and I have a sharp memory of the black of being underwater.  The next thing I remember is being back on the couch in the lake house, and I have a vague sense that my dad rescued me from the water.

Holy crap, right?  Except for one thing: neither of my parents has any memory of this event.  This rules out any dramatic rescue or loss of consciousness, because that wouldn't be easily forgotten; Mom does remember, quite clearly, the time I fell out of a shopping cart directly onto my head.  (As smart as I am anyway, I can only assume that if she had not allowed me to stand up in the cart, I would have a nobel prize by now.)  I can think of three possibilities, then, for what really happened.

1. It never happened, and this memory is the product of mis-remembered fragments and possibly invention.

2. I dreamed it and forgot it was a dream.

3. The event in question did happen, but I was only in the water for a split second before Dad snatched me out.  I don't remember the next few minutes because it was forever ago, and my parents don't remember the event at all because there was never enough danger for it to make a lasting impression.  To little land-lubber me, though, it was genuinely traumatic.

I'll likely never know.  Interesting how memory works... or how it doesn't.

Mom says I used to suffer from night terrors; that I would be sitting in bed screaming and she couldn't wake me up.  I have no memory of this, but I do remember some terrifying dreams.  In one, a highly dramatic twist on a real event, a bull had gotten loose and made its way into a small room, where I was stuck with it.

I also had a recurring dream with variations of the following:  My parents would be having a party with twenty or more adult friends, all milling around in the dimly lit first floor of our Third Street house.  I would be sent upstairs to bed, but in the upstairs hallway I would encounter a large crocodile.  This crocodile had an extremely long tongue (I always remember it as a "twenty foot tongue," though I don't recall ever measuring), which could snake about with great dexterity and would instantly kill anyone it touched.  This was just knowledge I had; I always woke before the dreaded tongue came out.  Until one night--and I think this only happened once--when the crocodile broke the rules of the dream and appeared downstairs, where it shot its tongue out and killed several people before hitting me.  I fell, feeling myself die, and then woke up.

Every night of my childhood I went to bed terrified that I would have this dream.  During my bedtime prayers I begged God to give me no dreams, so afraid was I of nightmares.  I worried that if I prayed for "good dreams," God might send me dreams that had scary moments but resolved happily, and I knew that the scary moments would nonetheless leave me lying in bed, afraid to close my eyes, unable to go to sleep until I had woken my mom (knowing she was awake made me feel safe enough to fall asleep).  And that I would remember those scary moments just when bedtime came around the following night.

I sometimes wonder if such fervent determination not to dream is to blame for the rarity of remembered dreams today.

Perhaps I have my trauma, after all.