This is not your typical mom post by any means. This is not me rambling about being overwhelmed. This is not about my parenting. This is not about mom shaming. This is not any of your typical posts that come from me, but I need to write this down. I feel like a crazy person and this topic is haunting my dreams. Quite literally.
I know that dreams are a window into your subconscious. Your dreams and nightmares are likely trying to tell you something. For that reason most of my nightmares reflect my biggest fears involving my kids. Why my kids? Because I’m more afraid of something happening to them than anything else and my nightmares follow that pattern. Obviously that occasionally changes, but not very frequently and not for long.
I do have a lot more nightmares than dreams. I’ve had nightmares of abductions, house fires, robbers, all your typical fears as a mom. (At least I think, unless one of you tells me I’m crazy.) These fears don’t change. I’ll always be afraid of someone hurting my kids. Lately though, they’ve been a little different and I’m trying to figure out these nightmares.
So last month I had a “theme” for lack of a better word of people hunting down my children and I to hurt us. It was terrifying. It was graphic. And not at all the normal for me. Since then it’s just gotten stranger and more abnormal. My “theme” for this month has been very strange. The characters have changed throughout the month but the theme has stayed the same. And within the past week and a half it has been the same exact nightmare just with different settings. Different houses. Different areas. Same nightmare.
All this month I’ve had nightmares about people in my life getting possessed. Never me, but all of the people who surround me. But not even possessed. It’s like a demon makes an exact replica of that person and hides the actual person somewhere, or is just avoiding them throughout. The demon has that persons face and body, but no their demeanor, which is what ultimately helps me figure out that it’s not the person I know. My parents, Joe, my sister, my niece and nephew, they’ve all been in at least one of these nightmares.
To go into more detail with what’s stumping me though is the recurring one for the past week and a half. The one that’s the exact same nightmare in different settings. I’ll just explain the one I had last night.
So basically Joseph and I were living in this three story house, that also had a basement. Joseph and I went downstairs to the ground floor to get something before bed. In typical fashion our children followed us down and talked our ear off the whole time. I told Joe I was putting the kids to bed and went upstairs with them. The kids had this huge bed that they shared together in what looked like a master suite, which like, is odd but ok. Joey was not there, also, odd. So the three of us were waiting patiently in the kids room with the light on listening to Joe hit some golf balls. Then I heard him out in the hallway talking to children. Now I have had this nightmare before and for whatever reason I knew that in the nightmare that this had happened before. Joseph was telling the kids “what are you doing out here? I thought mommy was putting you to bed. You know you aren’t supposed to be out there”. I opened this giant double door into the hallway and just as I thought Joseph was out there talking to our actual children and the two in the bed were demons. I turned and looked at them and then woke up.
I have no idea what these demons want. I never figure it out. I always wake up before I get to that part. And for whatever reason the demons and possession isn’t even what scares me. I woke up last night after that, woke Joe up to talk it out so maybe I could sleep, but it just kept bugging me. Like I said, the possessions don’t scare me for whatever reason. What scares me is that in the nightmare I don’t know that the demons aren’t my kids. I don’t know that these things are impostors. And that terrifies me and disturbs me.
I would know if it wasn’t my child wouldn’t I? If something ever happened to my kids and someone replaced them I would know wouldn’t I? I’m a mother. I know my kids. I would know that it wasn’t them. I would know if it was in fact not my child standing in front of me right? For some reason this idea is haunting me. I know the likelihood of someone replacing my kids is so unbelievably low, so why does this scare me so much that I wouldn’t know that someone had done it? Is this playing into my fear that this world is such a scary place and children get abducted all the time? Is it because I’ve read one too many story about a child that got abducted and the wrong child was “rescued” and returned to the parents several years later? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But the idea of not knowing if my own kids are standing in front of me or not truly shakes me to my core. What kind of mother doesn’t know her own kids, right?
Ideally, I’d like to stop having nightmares. That’s unlikely though, so right now I just want to figure this out. I want the thought to stop haunting me. I want to figure out the root of this particular nightmare “theme”. This one really has me stumped. What kind of nightmares do other mothers have? Am I a complete weirdo? Are my nightmares like off the wall? What is going on in that brain of mine? What is it trying to tell me? I just need to figure this out, because it’s not the newborn that’s keeping me up at night.