We have a pounding headache, we've had one for most of the afternoon...no amount of water is helping. Maybe it's the antibiotics we're on for our kidney infection, but we’ll try to get through this post.
This post is on Bethany’s behalf, because she didn’t want to write it herself and it was a shared dream. Actually we don’t know if it was part flashback, part dream - I don't recall flashbacks, but I wouldn't...
It was about two weeks ago, Bethany and James had just gone to sleep, James having just read her the story written for us by our friend @JimRitchie called The Pomegranate Prince.
The dream started out insignificant with an awareness of their being a hotel across the street from our apartment building, where a couple of our Twitter friends we’re staying, then it gets fuzzy and Bethany is aware that she is laying next to one of our friends on a bed, there is no inappropriate touching and there are no uncomfortable feelings, then suddenly the person in the bed next to her is James, and she is laying her head on his chest, happy and content.
There is a brief time lapse and James is gone, replaced by a stranger who starts touching Bethany. She gets mildly uncomfortable and rolls over to the other side of the bed, and another time lapse. Bethany opens her eyes in the dim room, and there is a stranger, a male, standing next to her side if the bed. He is naked and he is positioning his penis over her face, over her mouth and she is scared. Then there is nothingness until the man is leaving the room and while he is gone, she gets off the bed, goes to the end and crouches and hides (as much as she can hide at the bottom of a bed, but, she’s six and it’s a dream after all) , when the man comes back from the room he is putting the sheet onto the bed, sort of fluffing it into the air and letting it fall back onto the bed, he sees Bethany tries to reach for her, to touch her and...
...and then it’s not Bethany’s dream anymore. It’s Franks dream, it’s my dream. I leap at the man and shove him on the bed and start choking him, I am enjoying choking him, and I am yelling at him, I am angry he has scared Bethany.
A woman who appears to have been sleeping in the living room of our apartment (I don't fully recognize her), walks to the doorway of the bedroom and asks what is going on, alarmed she pulls me off of the man. As she’s holding my arms back I can vividly remember seeing him, and gasping breathlessly, staring at him, and telling the woman that I wasn’t going to kill him, I just wanted him to feel fear, I wanted to hurt him and I wanted him to be scared.
And then I am sobbing, and I wake up and the sobbing wakes up James who turns to me and holds me in our arms as we try to explain, very poorly, what our dream was about. He manages to calm me down, then we get undressed (Bethany was sleeping in a pink and white cotton nighty that goes down to our knees, and most of us can't sleep with clothes on) and fall back asleep.
None of us have many dreams that we can remember, especially not ones that we can’t shake off. We have had dreams that lasted for days. When we were married, back when we were severely depressed and sleeping all the time we got into a dream sequence that picked up where it left off every time we fell back asleep, and we became addicted to sleep. Thinking back on it was probably our brains way of protecting us, keeping us in a state of sleep, but it only worked so long.
What did this dream mean, was it just a dream? We’ve never experienced a switch in dreams before, it was...scary...and felt so real (the switch). What concerns us is that Bethany is the key to all of our memories, as far as we know both those before eight years of age, maybe some after. She has yet to share even a happy one with us. We don’t have many memories, but we are sure that Melody must hold some of them, as well as Catherine and Cassandra. I don’t recall ever knowing if The Other Girl had flashbacks, the last several months with her was not so much spent talking and becoming friendly, if you know what I mean. Will we have flashbacks in the event an alter won't give up her/his memories?
Anyway, the dream is being put here for recording purposes. We won’t try to interpret it, not today; only wonder. We'll have to do research we suppose, which is something we hate doing, researching our illness; or maybe we will ask some of the people with DID/MPD who follow us on Twitter (or if they read this, a comment would be greatly appreciated)...how do you tell when you are having a flashback, and not just a dream? Was the fact that the incident took place in what we recognized as our current day apartment an indication that it was a dream?
We’re not sure what’s going on this last week, we’ve had multiple cases of déjà vu since we started at this new job (on the job déjà vu), we’ve been having a lot of headaches (even though we've been drinking mad amounts of water compared to the last year), and we've been switching so hard and so fast, that apparently we are doing things and saying things, and having stuff done to us, that it doesn't have time to make it into the memory bank...we’re trying to not be concerned about this.
Maybe we have a tumor. Maybe I won't be good at management of Us, maybe I don't know what the fuck I did by having us eliminate our Core; though after we posted our review of The Ward, and discussed our concerns (the film, unknowing to us, dealt with just this topic). However, a follower on Twitter who is a psychotherapist calmed our fears about ridding ourselves of The Other Girl by letting us know she knows of another case where it has happened, where an alter vanquished/eliminated/killed her Core, and so far it has worked our great for the alters involved, of course we know no details...
On another note, The Father (who says hi to all of you, btw….but mostly our Twitter friends, telling us "Tell your Twitter friends The Father says ‘hi’"..and then he grinned, and chuckled the way dad chuckles) took a road trip with one of our uncles this month and told him about our Dissociative Identity Disorder,/Multiple Personality Disorder, because apparently family members have been asking about The Other Girl, why she doesn’t have a Facebook account anymore (it was deleted/closed in January), and what has happened to her. We haven’t talked to or seen any family, aside from immediate members, since last September (2010).
We felt a little choked up when The Father told us he had told his brother that we were afraid about how the family might treat us, or react, to finding out about our history of mental illness, and who we are.
He said "We’d love her just the same, and treat her no differently that if she had diabetes"and we could tell when The Father said it he was a bit choked up as well.
So, it’s gotten to a family members, which means it's gotten to more than one...and we’re a little uncertain about how we feel about this. Mostly because we know our family...and all that that implies.
The Father also chatted with us about James; he’s a little surprised and made sure to convey to us that a man selling his flat (condo) and motorcycle to move to...well, where we are...is a pretty big thing.
"Are you ready for this?" he asked, which is sorta cute because, uh...we’re 32 and we’ve been married, and for the most part, we’re grown-ups (meanwhile, James has been in the process of selling his house for months before we even met him…forgot to tell The Father that :-/)
So, Bethany had a flashback...or was it a dream? And now our extended family is going to know about all of us...also something about one of our cousins is a psychologist...The Father asked if we ever thought to write her a letter...we haven't seen her more than once in ten years...and she's family, so...yeah...no.
~Frankie
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