Abused children will sometimes dream of getting hurt really bad, getting terminally ill, being kidnapped or severely injured in some kind of an accident, because then they can dream of their parents finally caring about what is happening to them. Abusive parents often act like nothing that is happening to the child is ‘serious enough to care’, so the child fixes a fantasy of that one time when it would be serious enough to force them.
It enables the child to imagine their parents being concerned, scared for the child’s life, getting them to a hospital or simply being worried and loving and hopeful that the child will be alright, that they’ll stay alive. For the abused children, there’s often no other way to prove to themselves that their parents care, so they’ll fantasize about a scenario that would force their parents into a situation where they’d have to show care, they’d have to slip into action and to something immediately on the spot in order to save the child. It also enables a child to fantasize about their parent being kind, even if it’s out of fear that they’re losing the child. The child reassures themselves that their parents would care, in a life-or-death kind of situation at least.
If you have to imagine a life-or-death scenario in order to imagine your parents caring and being concerned, your parents are most likely abusive.
There’s another reason abused children will imagine all kinds of horrible things happening to them - things like being physically tortured, abandoned, kidnapped, violated, sold or exploited - and that’s because children are trying to think of a situation where their pain would be explained by real-life events. The child might be in so much pain, but since they’re convinced that they’re not abused, and they’re groomed to normalize and accept the abuse as ‘no big deal’ and ‘just being sensitive’, they can find no reason for their emotional turmoil. So, they wish they had something. ‘If only I was kidnapped and tortured, then it would be reasonable to feel this kind of pain, and everyone would acknowledge it and believe me’.
That’s a thought only someone who is already badly abused can have. Normal people don’t wish for severe trauma to happen, only to explain and acknowledge their feelings. The massive amount of trauma that explains those feelings is already happening, but the child is conditioned not to be able to acknowledge it or even see it as real; they’re used to their senses and experiences to be dismissed as nothing, so it’s impossible for the child to take themselves seriously, to acknowledge that they’re already being tortured.
These fantasies can also be over-the-top cruel, not because the children are being dramatic, but because the children have been told that only the most extreme, most traumatic, and most heavy to endure situations would ever be serious enough to be acknowledged. They’re being compared constantly to ‘those who have it worse’, so in their fantasy, they’re going to have it the absolute worst.
Dreaming of trauma is often a symptom of trauma. If you spent your childhood imagining horrible scenarios, and even hoping for them, it’s likely you already had it bad enough, and just wanted for other people to see and acknowledge it, and the imagined trauma was just something that would help that to happen. it’s possible that these fantasies are followed by some sort of guilt (what kind of person would hope for these things?), but it’s absolutely none of your fault. You were searching for acknowledgment and for your feelings to be something explainable, something other people would understand and admit as real. This was something denied to you, and it was making your pain worse for everyone to pretend you had no reason to feel it. You were not imagining it for the attention - you would only ever get negative attention for expressing such things anyway.
You were trying to make sense of the world that made no sense to you. You wanted to be heard and understood. You wanted to be cared about, and you wanted for others to take your pain seriously, which you had every right to. Life shouldn’t have been so awful for you that you had to imagine worst case scenarios as comfort story.
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