© Miriam A. Mason
After contemplating for the past 8 months, I have decided it is time to reveal who my narcissistically sick father was. Because it shows how good someone can look on paper, while being torrentially abusive in private.
His name was Leonard E. Nathan. Actually, his name was Edward Leonard Nathan, but he was called Leonard his entire life. I guess "Ed" wouldn't have fit his narrow idea of what a poet should be called.
Look him up. He's on wiki and has several books of poetry out. Regardless of what it says on paper in any form, his actual living of life involved destroying his children's individuality and loves every single day. Of being so absent a parent in other regards that his oldest became a heroin addict at 14 and his second child divorced the entire family, and now me, and this blog.
He was an ugly human being inside. A child never emotionally grown. And the result was a self-interested schmuck. Scared, power-biting, cruel, mean, neglectful, and prone to physical violence against his kids (I didn't get dad mad if I could possibly avoid it).
Now there's something more honest about him on paper. Right here. On this page.
You can figure out the rest of the names of my family members from here, pretty much.
* * *
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
30 - Dream Shift: Of Murky Waters and A Home for the Heart
© Miriam A. Mason
All my life that I can remember my dreams, the bulk of them have always involved being on land, with a slowly rising murky muddy unclear water all around me and everyone around me.
It's still brown water, no clarity, inching toward my place of safety, removing places I had once felt safe, drowning them slowly, killing all it swallowed up. No way to ever know what lies below that water. It never reaches me, but it comes close, before I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering why my dreams wanted to drown me in murky waters.
My place of safety is usually a house of some sort. But I never get to pay attention to the house because of the rising water. What is this water? Why is it present so much? Why is it rising, threatening to cover up everything around me including myself?
I cannot count the number of times I've dreamed of this gray-brown water. Thousands, probably. It has always been a common theme, since I was 10 or 11 years old. (These were the years of the rapes in the Berkeley, California, school system.)
I've never known the meaning of the water, even though I knew it must symbolize something very important to show up so often and perform the same slow rising engulfment of myself over and over again.
As I got closer and closer to having the break that eventually inspired this blog, and moved from viewing my family as perfect to viewing them as deeply dysfunctional, with all the classical signs present for all to see, this dream evolved. Now, the water was much more active, and became a dark ocean, deep and vast, but making huge waves toward my place of safety. With each growing gray wave, the water would again rise a bit more, still swallowing me and everything around me up. It was drowning me much faster, much more threateningly.
Then this blog exploded out of me, and light poured into my mind as I wrote and wrote and processed and processed. The dreams of water halted. For the first time in over 40 years.
Only now do I realize clearly that the gray-brown rising water was my family taking over who I was entirely. It was my admission to my loss of my own identity and power. It was pursuing me, after me, always rising, slowly choking out all the things I loved and dreamed of, especially my own being.
Now that this blog has been written and I continue to process what happened in my life and how I feel about it, and who I really am underneath all that dark murky threatening water my family was, I find I am having a new dream thematic.
Now I am dreaming of a house. In each dream, it is a different house, but always a pretty magnificent large one. A house I feel love for, and want to explore, want to savor, want to stay close. So far, I have only explored the room I am in within my dream, except perhaps in one dream, in which I discovered my parents in another room of the house and felt the hint of gray water rising again. But my goal is to begin walking around each of the houses I find, and finding all the good things that are me in each of the rooms. The feeling I get when I am in the house in my dream is really good. A feeling of deserving this big house, of wanting it to remain, and even not wanting to wake up because I love the house so much. I need more dream time there.
And no gray water. No murkiness. Just a big magnificent different mystery house in each dream.
Both the water and the houses make sense to me now. The house is who I really am, who I really want to be without any imposition from any family member. I feel new in the house, as if I've never had the opportunity to explore my own house and I'm just now, at 52 years old, beginning to do so. And I feel so young in the dreams.
I wanted this down on paper. And I am eager to explore this dream more than I've ever been before about any dream. I want to walk all through the house, and look at each beautiful room, lighted with great big opened windows, sunshine, clear skies, trees. The murk has been replaced by clear water, from faucets or a peaceful ocean lapping at the sand quietly and withdrawing as it should nearby. And no parents, no family. They were washed away with the water. Perhaps I will find me at different ages, in which case, I would very much like to stop and hug that younger me. Tell her she is worthy of so much love, full of beauty in her individuality, and deserving of so much better than she was given. I want to tell each one of her that she did an amazing thing simply by surviving. And that she is powerful and she will find her way. And that I am here for her.
No longer am I looking out windows or down steep walls at a rising body of water. Now I am in the house. In my house. Making up my own mind about myself, about who I am, and what I want.
It feels poetic (a trigger word, obviously, but unavoidable, and still working hard to disassociate poetry and my father). And as though a weight has lifted that I finally understand what all those years of the gray murky rising water meant to me.
I love my subconscious. I think it's helped more than I can possibly understand around all this recovering I've been doing.
Dream on, Me. I deserve that big beautiful house, all of them, actually. They are my dreams, after all.
* * *
All my life that I can remember my dreams, the bulk of them have always involved being on land, with a slowly rising murky muddy unclear water all around me and everyone around me.
It's still brown water, no clarity, inching toward my place of safety, removing places I had once felt safe, drowning them slowly, killing all it swallowed up. No way to ever know what lies below that water. It never reaches me, but it comes close, before I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering why my dreams wanted to drown me in murky waters.
My place of safety is usually a house of some sort. But I never get to pay attention to the house because of the rising water. What is this water? Why is it present so much? Why is it rising, threatening to cover up everything around me including myself?
I cannot count the number of times I've dreamed of this gray-brown water. Thousands, probably. It has always been a common theme, since I was 10 or 11 years old. (These were the years of the rapes in the Berkeley, California, school system.)
I've never known the meaning of the water, even though I knew it must symbolize something very important to show up so often and perform the same slow rising engulfment of myself over and over again.
As I got closer and closer to having the break that eventually inspired this blog, and moved from viewing my family as perfect to viewing them as deeply dysfunctional, with all the classical signs present for all to see, this dream evolved. Now, the water was much more active, and became a dark ocean, deep and vast, but making huge waves toward my place of safety. With each growing gray wave, the water would again rise a bit more, still swallowing me and everything around me up. It was drowning me much faster, much more threateningly.
Then this blog exploded out of me, and light poured into my mind as I wrote and wrote and processed and processed. The dreams of water halted. For the first time in over 40 years.
Only now do I realize clearly that the gray-brown rising water was my family taking over who I was entirely. It was my admission to my loss of my own identity and power. It was pursuing me, after me, always rising, slowly choking out all the things I loved and dreamed of, especially my own being.
Now that this blog has been written and I continue to process what happened in my life and how I feel about it, and who I really am underneath all that dark murky threatening water my family was, I find I am having a new dream thematic.
Now I am dreaming of a house. In each dream, it is a different house, but always a pretty magnificent large one. A house I feel love for, and want to explore, want to savor, want to stay close. So far, I have only explored the room I am in within my dream, except perhaps in one dream, in which I discovered my parents in another room of the house and felt the hint of gray water rising again. But my goal is to begin walking around each of the houses I find, and finding all the good things that are me in each of the rooms. The feeling I get when I am in the house in my dream is really good. A feeling of deserving this big house, of wanting it to remain, and even not wanting to wake up because I love the house so much. I need more dream time there.
And no gray water. No murkiness. Just a big magnificent different mystery house in each dream.
Both the water and the houses make sense to me now. The house is who I really am, who I really want to be without any imposition from any family member. I feel new in the house, as if I've never had the opportunity to explore my own house and I'm just now, at 52 years old, beginning to do so. And I feel so young in the dreams.
I wanted this down on paper. And I am eager to explore this dream more than I've ever been before about any dream. I want to walk all through the house, and look at each beautiful room, lighted with great big opened windows, sunshine, clear skies, trees. The murk has been replaced by clear water, from faucets or a peaceful ocean lapping at the sand quietly and withdrawing as it should nearby. And no parents, no family. They were washed away with the water. Perhaps I will find me at different ages, in which case, I would very much like to stop and hug that younger me. Tell her she is worthy of so much love, full of beauty in her individuality, and deserving of so much better than she was given. I want to tell each one of her that she did an amazing thing simply by surviving. And that she is powerful and she will find her way. And that I am here for her.
No longer am I looking out windows or down steep walls at a rising body of water. Now I am in the house. In my house. Making up my own mind about myself, about who I am, and what I want.
It feels poetic (a trigger word, obviously, but unavoidable, and still working hard to disassociate poetry and my father). And as though a weight has lifted that I finally understand what all those years of the gray murky rising water meant to me.
I love my subconscious. I think it's helped more than I can possibly understand around all this recovering I've been doing.
Dream on, Me. I deserve that big beautiful house, all of them, actually. They are my dreams, after all.
* * *
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