I had a nightmare last night.

That’s not unusual. I used to have nightmares almost every night, but that’s gotten better with time and some hard work in therapy. Now it’s usually just a couple times a week. And, if I’ve had a tough day mentally, I can take medication which helps keep them at bay for the most part. Sometimes, though, a nightmare will squeak past my defenses and I’ll either wake with a start or have to be woken up by my husband. Last night I woke up from it myself. Medication was of no help to me this time.

To untrained analysts, this dream wouldn’t seem at all like a nightmare. Weird, sure, but nothing that ought to have filled me with existential dread and despair. But it did; that’s how I recognize my more subtle nightmares for what they are nowadays, if it isn’t immediately obvious. At the heart of the matter, things like the dark and insects and monsters aren’t my biggest fears. Not even close. Those subjects are child’s play compared to my psychological scars.

Anybody see where I’m going with this yet? Allow me to describe last night’s bad dream, and maybe you can pick it out.

My husband and daughter and I are at a restaurant, nondescript but known for generous portions of very tasty food. For some reason we’re isolated in a private area at the back, with doors that can shut closed. There’s another dining area that we can go into, and some other diners are in there, all much older than the three of us, eating and talking merrily. My daughter has gotten her dinner but we are still waiting for ours. We are waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Finally I go to the other dining area where the restaurant owner, an older lady, is chatting with the other patrons. I join some conversation and politely let her know how long we’ve been waiting for our delicious meals and ask if she’d check on them. She’s super apologetic and assures that she’ll make sure we get our food, which at this point we need to just take to go because my kid has already eaten and is getting antsy. Finally, another really long amount of time later, she brings out two large plastic containers – and they only contain some measly, tiny portions of mushy vegetables, hardly taking up any space in the takeout containers. Needless to say, I completely lose it over this – and she just smiles at me sweetly, her eyes like a snake’s, and tells me that this should do just fine. All I need is some food after all, I should be grateful, isn’t this good enough?

That’s the point where I jolted awake.

At first I scolded myself at 4:00AM for feeling so discombobulated over a pretty stupid dream. It’s not like it was a “regular nightmare” (whatever that is). But as my heartbeat steadied, I realized that it was all metaphorical. It all aligned symbolically with the reality I dealt with for most of my life, which was that I was never seen or heard or listened to, that my needs didn’t matter in comparison to everyone else’s (and in point of fact, I was the one who was supposed to cater to their needs – all of their needs…).Whatever I did get for myself was expected to be sufficient, whether it actually met my needs or not. Indeed, I needed to be grateful for what I did get, because I should consider how fortunate I was compared to everyone else who needed more, who needed the help I was providing them. That was where my value lay, in all that I could do for others.

In therapy yesterday (which was obviously the impetus of the screwed up dream), we were discussing what Younger Me was like, what she was interested in, what her preferences were, what made her happy…I was drawing a blank. From birth, I’d been assigned a job — to put everyone else first, to be as nondescript and non-needy as possible. I had interests and preferences and such, of course I did. But I couldn’t remember any of it. Silence stretched long and hollow as I struggled to come up with any response at all. Any of that stuff was irrelevant at the time, and my brain had always had far more important work to do than to remember my favorite color or what my bedspread looked like or what posters I had on my walls or what I liked to do with my spare time (such little as I had). My therapist tried her best to get me to “ask” Younger Me about what she likes, as opposed to just trying to remember my past, but even then, I couldn’t come up with more than one thing that she really had to tease out of me.

Thankfully, I am not that person anymore as a 34-year-old adult, but I’ve been doing a lot of reliving that time in my life when I was that person (childhood, teenagerhood, most of my twenties). It isn’t as far behind me chronologically as I generally like to pretend it is, and my subconscious has a rude way of reminding me of that when I’m supposed to be asleep. Maybe it’s kind of like Captain America/Steve Rogers; he was in his early 20s when he crashed the plane into the frozen ocean, and ended up in suspended animation, to be woken up over seventy years later. Technically he was in his 90s, but biologically, he was still very much a young adult. Technically I’m 34; mentally, my present-day self that people know now is really more or less six years old. Everything often feels quite disjointed. I know who I am now, or at least I’ve made great headway in figuring it out. But, what about who I used to be? A lot of the time it feels like I’m learning about a stranger, instead of myself. I think that perhaps the worst part about it is that this fallout was more or less by design.

For most of my life I’ve had vivid scary dreams about spiders and bees, which are quite unpleasant. But erasure? Invisibility? Dismissal? Invalidation? That, dears, is my worst nightmare.