The nightmares

I don’t remember when the nightmares began. The came on heavy about the time I really started digging in for 1L exams.

My wife had taken to watching multiple episodes of a television show called Dexter after a friend loaned her the first couple of seasons on DVD. I was about a young man named Dexter Morgan who was a serial killer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_(TV_series)). There was one episode, or a series of episodes, that dealt with the origins of the protagonist’s deadly rage and desire to kill those he considered evil. His mother, and perhaps a few other adults, were killed in front of Dexter and Dexter’s older brother by a group of men in a gruesome manner. They were cut into pieces with a chain saw.

I know, it’s not my kind of television either.

The image that was burned into my brain at this time was that of Dexter’s mother kneeling before a hulking dark figure of a man, pleading with her then three year old son to “not watch” and to “look away” as the man pulled the cord on his chain saw. Her cries that “Mommy loves you” are something that I can still hear, even now. It was grotesque. It was shocking. It was deeply disturbing. It struck me to the core.

When the stress level was unbearable, and I was getting five hours of sleep a night, if that, I could hear and see this scene in my mind even during waking hours. It was like a hallucination. It was always there.

Another haunting villain was the Other Mother from the 2009 Henry Selick film Coraline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film)). This film did not feature the same blood soaked over-the-top shock value horror of Dexter. Rather, it crept into my unconscious because it had scared my daughter. the fact that my daughter watched it and was scared by it.

My daughter, who was three years old at the time, asked questions about the characters, their motivation, and why certain things happened the way they did. I realized she was exploring the boundaries of evil. Her fears became my own. The imagery of abandoned children with button eyes became a staple of my own fear of failing as a parent in my second year of law school.

Another part of the film which struck a chord was that Coraline’s father was busy in his home office and did not pay adequate attention to his child. This lack of being there, both physically and emotionally, led to her exposure to the evil which was the antagonist, the spider woman called Other Mother. The theme of not being present hit me squarely in the gut. Really, as a law student going full throttle, I wasn’t there at all.

That damn spider got into my head and would not leave.

In a third example involved an older boy, a bully, who appeared in my dreams. I would be running along a path, through the trees, along the edge of a small lake. The bully and my daughter would be on a dock, and he would be laughing and pushing my daughter's head underwater as she screamed. The screams. It was terrible! Of course, I would be running to save her, and I would never get there. It was as if the distance to the dock continued to get longer not matter how fast I ran. Classic nightmare material. I would wake up with her screams echoing in my ears.

There were others, some repeated, others one-time occurrences. All shared common themes of endangerment to my children and my inability, or outright failure, to help them in a time of great need. Helplessness. Danger. Failure to protect. Over and over again.

Many did not include the horrorshow of Dexter, with death, blood and dismemberment, but rather were built upon a core of failure and that the consequences of that failure would not be good. One I can remember now involved some lack of foresight or planning on my part so that my children and I ended up having to walk in the snow barefoot. The basic "showed up to class naked" stuff, really.

There was a thread of real darkness about most of them. Despair. Anguish.

Although walking in the snow seems relatively harmless now, something one could laugh about in hindsight, at the time I would lay awake staring at the ceiling. Then, like now, it was all about trying to make sense of what I had gotten my family into with this whole law school thing.