The dream

It's 7:50 a.m. on a Sunday, but I'm up because of a dream I just had. My dreams are very surreal and I never remember a lot of details, so bear with me as I try to describe it. Often there are characters I know, but also characters I seem to know, but who do not exist in real life, and the setting is familiar, but in reality somewhere I've never been.

I'm somewhere with my family, but not sure where. I'm in a room by myself, talking on the phone. Someone, who I seem to know, brings in a young child, who I seem to know as well, and asks me to watch her. Apparently, she's getting some sort of timeout. I tell whoever I'm talking to I've got to go, and within the next few minutes, two or three more children, who also seem to have misbehaved, are brought in. I'm about to start talking with them, find out what the issue is and see if I can resolve it, and somehow my mom enters the picture and starts yelling at them. As is a child's nature, they start to argue with her about why they were doing whatever they were doing that got them in trouble. The more they argue, the more furious my mom becomes, and it quickly becomes evident that my mom's anger is inciting the bad behavior. I try and explain this to my mom and calm her down, but it only infuriates her more.

So much so that she knocks me down and kicks me in the ribs. I remember being curled up in a fetal position, and then the dream fast-forwards to the next day. I am at some kind of business, it seems like a bank, but I'm not sure, and I'm waiting in line. I'm thinking about my mom, and I remember clearly thinking (clear details are a rarity for me in a dream) that I wish I could tell my mom that her anger does not have to control her; that no one makes you angry, you allow yourself to become angry. So I'm standing here thinking this, and tears start streaming down my face and I don't bother to try and stop them.

Then I hear the most fatherly voice say, with a bit of a Southern drawl, "Darlin', if it helps, I would take a bullet for you if I could." I respond, "I'm not sure it would," and turn around to see a tall, dapper older man in a sheriff's uniform, with a badge, gun and all. That was pretty much the end of the dream. When I woke up, I laid in bed and cried for a minute or two.

Though I don't remember my dreams much, this dream, played out in a variety of scenarios, is a common one for me. I'm with my family, and something sends my mother into a screaming rage. Her physical assault and the gentleman at the end are new additions. The interpretation of my mom's rage is easy--I saw it all the time as a child. I won't say that my mom never hit my--my parents believed in spanking--but my mom would never have physically abused me.

When I graduated from high school, I went to college several hundred miles from home, because I knew I didn't need to live near my mom. I love her, but I did not want to be the angry person she was. It seemed whenever I would argue with her, she would let her anger control her, and I would do the same. I was too young and too close to the emotions of it to be able to change that about myself with her nearby.

My mom has changed a lot over the past few years, and I don't see that side of her much anymore. Obviously, though, it still affects me more than I want it to or realize. Which I kind of think is what the man at the end of the dream is showing. Looking at the gun in his holster and knowing that in his line of work, he fully understood the meaning of taking a bullet for someone, I had no doubt that he had not said those words lightly and that he meant them. But knowing that really didn't help, because knowing that a stranger would do that for you doesn't mean much when someone you love, who supposedly loves you, doesn't care enough about you to control their anger.

While that's how I viewed it in my dream, and for many years in real life, that's not quite how I see it now. I just think my mom didn't know where to reach out for help. We lived in a small town, and she was a preacher's wife--what kind of scandal would it have been if she'd been going to a therapist and someone found out? After all, isn't the preacher's wife supposed to have it all together? Even if she could have gotten past that stigma, my parents were dirt poor, so I know my mom could never justify to herself the cost of getting help when there were so many other things her children needed.

What upset me the most about this dream was that when I woke up, I felt like my mom wasn't really representing my mom this time. More than that, she was representing a good friend of mine who seems to be headed down the same road. The difference is, he knows that he can get help, and he has the resources to do it. But I'm afraid his pride is more important to him than the people he cares about.

A few months ago, I really saw his anger for the first time. He blew up at me and it scared me to death. I think when my mom pushed and kicked me in the dream, that didn't represent her at all; that was completely representative of my friend. He's never laid a hand on me, but after what I saw that night, I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility. We didn't talk for a month and a half, aside from a few scant emails trying to sort things out, and one email from him that said, "I'm sorry..." and nothing more. Then he called me up out of the blue and asked me to come over. When I did, he pretty much acted as if nothing had happened. When I tried to talk about it, he didn't think it was a big deal. I was there for about 15 minutes at most before I left and said I couldn't do it.

I'm having a hard time with this, because I feel like I'm walking away from a friend of six years who is going through something and may need my help. But I don't think he's willing to accept any help right now, and until he can take some responsibility and work on fixing the problem, I can't be in his life. I know how much anger can hurt the people you care about it, and I'm not strong enough to go through that again--no matter how much it hurts right now.