the devil inside

"Regardless of the outcome, you feel so much better about yourself when you do what you think is the right thing. That alone is worth the risk." 

- Bruno Bettelheim

As I was falling asleep I awoke with a violent start, feeling like someone had drop kicked me from the unconscious to the conscious realm. I carried with me an image of a young female prostitute sitting on an old, ratty brown couch.  As I watched from somewhere in the ethers, she crouched away from the fist beating she was receiving from a handsome, professional looking man who stood behind her.  He beat her on her shoulders, back and head. She was beautiful and indifferent, even as she was beaten. She was imbued with a real natural beauty of the most enviable type that she was obviously fighting against.

Some dreams just resonate.  They come from the most unacknowledged areas of existence. They open the door to those hazy, buried bits of experience that didn't suit us and ended up packed away where we forgot we'd had them. And here, right here, was a room, door flung open, waiting to be cleaned, emptied and sorted out!  I'd been searching for this place for months.   I excitedly noted that I should write this down to consider it further in the morning. That thought was interrupted. The interrupter was loud, persuasive, genderless: "it's not important to remember that".

Who was telling me not to remember?  Who thinks they know what's important and what's not? Will there ever come a time when the unconscious is not provocative?
I went back to sleep. I did not write it down.

The hours passed uneventfully. Thirty minutes before my alarm was to go off, I awoke again. I had been dreaming the same dream again.  I had been dreaming the same dream again. Repetition increases importance and draws the attention.

The girl was slightly different, as was the scenery and the appearance of the man, but the theme was still the same: a beautiful, desperate girl being subdued with force by a strong man, shamelessly acceptable even as he acted so vile.  The woman was curling into herself, not fighting back.  She had no fear, no pain.  Without a sense of self-worth, it's not so shocking to be treated as if you are worthless.

And now, the ground is filling with a rumble. The change is reaching the shoreline. Can you feel it coming your direction?  It is palpable if we let it work its way into us.  Love is our right.  No fear.