dream and dream and dream and dream again
A nightmare I always had as a child – it was a recurring dream that scared me to bits – was of the devil, and the devil taking a hold of me and my family (most likely influenced by my petty, religious, cult-y upbringing). In the dream, I think I would wake up. The setting is the house that we lived in at the time, so you know that it felt so very very real. (Years later, I will have a dream that’s sorta set in that house, where I have a dick and this woman is sucking my dick. I don’t think we were supposed to be together – it felt forbidden, sort of like with Isaac or Piano Teacher or Baba-T or Kayode. I don’t know if sex will never feel like rebellion to me. Or living. I just want it to be sex – just a part of my living. But yeah, she sucked my dick and it felt good, but I remember being kinda scared. That someone would walk in, or that she would hurt me, or that I would hurt her). In this nightmare, I look out of my room to the corridor, and the devil, or someone that I interpret(ed) as the devil is sitting in the kitchen (which I can see from my room in the house’s layout) on the apótí (a stool that we had then – I once stood on this apótí and rocked back and forth until I fell into the nearby pot where my aunt was cooking a cake. I still have a scar from then. The apótí was the center of the kitchen for the longest time – we did everything on there, and with it. My first house chore involved me sitting on this stool. This devil is beckoning me to him, and I feel very drawn to him. I am scared by the fact that I cannot control my body and am being physically magnetized to him, no matter how much I try to turn or run away. I don’t know what he wants from me. I am part-way to the kitchen when I turn my head and see my parents and brother in the other room. There are three beds set up, one after the other, right next to each other. Each bed has a bronze-like bed frame and white sheets. My parents and brother aren’t lying on the beds. They are sitting up in the bed, and their eyes are vacant. I think their pupils were extra TINY (like little dots) or nonexistent, because it was mostly the whites of their eyes. I yelled to them, with no response. If they could hear me, they didn’t show it. They stared straight ahead and paid no mind as I was dragged by invisible sources towards the kitchen. It tried doing something that my mom and Nollywood movies had taught me to do in those situations (something that I find myself doing, still, in some of my anxiety dreams/nightmares), and I kept calling “the blood of Jesus,” saying it over and over until I hoped to feel a difference, or until everything and everyone went back to normal. I don’t know if the devil creature wanted to turn me into my family, or kill me, or make me his own, but I was so frightened when I was younger. I didn’t really have a place to channel this fear. I always slept with the blanket over my head, covering every bit of myself that was exposed to air, and tucking the blanket all around me 360 to protect me from the darkness and negative space. Sometimes, I would wake up to my mom whipping me because she was scared I would suffocate myself. I still sleep like this, but not as much from anxiety, I guess. (It’s a lie: wrapping myself up like this makes me feel safer). I don’t know (remember) how many times this dream recurred, but it is one of the first things I think of when prompted to think of a dream I have had. This dream was in my nightmares when I was 5! That was nearly 20 years ago, and it still lingers in my mind. It’s funny because part of the reason I knew (thought) the devil wanted me is because, as I looked at my (basically dead) family, I felt no remorse. More relief and guilt that relief was going to be the last thing I felt before I was consumed. I don’t feel regret about it, but five-year-old me was a bit scared about the depths of feeling that I could possibly feel (or maybe not feel). I was staring my own self in the face, and I knew that I could be capable of this. And I wasn’t confused about that.