Prison Dreams.
It’s 5am on a Wednesday morning, and like usual, I’m wide awake. Why am I up so early every morning? Prison dreams. I have these terrible nightmares about being in prison almost every night. It used to be here and there, but they have gotten worse lately. I have had them ever since I was a kid and was locked up in my first youth prison at age 13. I am almost 40 now and have not even been arrested in 18 years… but I do time every night.
Usually the dream will start in the middle of a prison break. I find myself arm-crawling through some sort of drainage tunnel. The tunnel is made of concrete, and only about 2 feet tall and 2 feet wide, with standing water of about 4 inches deep. It is infested with rats and roaches, smells like sewage, and I never seem to find the exit. In my dream, I am always with lots of other guys, fellow cons, who are apparently making the escape as well. I seem to be leading the escape, which has everyone angry with me because we can’t get out. The worst part of this dream is the sounds. The tunnel amplifies the cries and shouts of the men into high pitch bullets that penetrate my skull. All I can hear is the sound of men sobbing and bickering, shouting curses, and screaming my name. Crying myself, I climb as hard and fast as I can, frantically searching for a way out, but I never seem to find a way to escape.
I will wake up from my sleep about midnight, with my shirt soaking wet, out of breath, exhausted and confused. At first, I am certain that my shirt is wet from the tunnel somehow, and begin to check my body for more evidence that I was really just transported from another reality. I know it seems crazy, but this thought passes my mind every time, before I dismiss it quickly and find a clean shirt.
It feels so absolutely real, way more so than a dream. Like I am actually there in that prison. I’ve had the dream so many times, I can see the faces of the other men so vividly. I can’t recall any of their names, but I know their faces. And while I can never see my own face in the dream, or any of my dreams for that matter, I know that I am an older man. I always appear to be in my 60’s in these dreams, and leading this group of men out of this prison. As I crawl through the tunnel, I will see my arms, recognizing the Jesus tattoo on my left forearm, which always scares me because it is at that moment that I know for sure it is really me.
After I get back to sleep from my first sweaty wake up, I will quickly fall back into another prison dream, this time I’m usually sitting in a huge room made of painted bricks, painted concrete floors, and lots of flickering fluorescent lights. There are about 15–20 large round tables that hold about 6–8 guys each, for eating, playing cards, and just telling war stories about past crimes committed. This time, as I scan across the room at all the men, it’s different. There are no sounds of weeping and despair. Instead there are sounds of loud jeering men talking over the top of each other, with obnoxious belts of laughter, shouts and whoops in a variety of languages. The scene is nothing short of insanity. This large rectangle shaped room has cells (rooms for prisoners) across the back wall and both side walls, with an all glass wall in the front of the room that allows the prison guards to monitor our every move.
This part of the dream never lasts that long. I just kind of spy over the top of the prison block with a bird’s eye view trying to figure out how I got into this situation and how to get out. Things seem to play in fast-forward here and I see myself along with many other men just going through their daily routines. Things are happening so fast, it’s hard to make any observations besides a strange sequence: wake up in my cell with bright lights and the sound of the doors unlocking. Line up for chow and hear what sounds like pigs and dogs fighting for their fair share. Then playing cards, with lots of arguing and shouting. Finally back to my cell where I cry myself back to sleep until the next meal. This cycle will run for what appears to be several days over and over until I finally wake up again, back into my own reality, back into my own home. This time not with a soaking wet shirt, but a soaked pillow from crying.
When I wake up from this part of the dream, I desperately try to stay awake at least for a few moments in order to not fall right back into the dream. If I don’t sit up in bed and open my eyes for a few moments and really understand that it’s just a dream, I will be plunged right back in. This is the worst part, when I can't get out of the dream! If I fail to check myself back into reality, I find myself getting sucked into the dream. It’s like trying to swim and claw my way out of a fast running river, grasping for branches, barely reaching the shore, as the river takes me faster and farther than I can control back to the horrid reality of my sub-conscience. Sometimes, I get a hold of reality and climb back safely onto the shore, but most nights I lose the battle and the river takes me away.
The dream starts to hold me under. I know that sounds crazy, maybe it is, but I have to try to explain this terrible sensation, so it will stop hopefully. So at this point in the dream, I start to understand that the whole thing is a dream, and all I need to do is just wake up and I will be free. But I can't wake up. I just sit in the bird's eye view and watch days, weeks, and years of my life go by in the horrible prison. I will watch scenes go by where I’m telling another guy about my four sons and how I need to get out to take care of them! I tell him “This is not real!” I shout at him two inches from his face as loud as I can, “This is a dream! We are trapped in a dream!” The man who is my friend apparently grabs me and violently bear hugs me and throws the two of us onto the ground and shouts back at me, “You gotta let it go! It’s not a dream, you are in here forever!”
At that point, I totally collapse into a puddle of a man without even the will left to cry, or even to breathe. As I begin to accept that this is real, and that I am never going to see my wife and my boys again, I begin to suffocate. My lungs feel too heavy to lift off my chest and they collapse. Soon my throat closes shut and I start to lose vision. My friend holds me as I begin to die in his arms unable to breathe, unable to even fight it. This is when I finally wake up.
This is not the exact dream every time, but it is usually these pieces in this order, just sometimes there are more scenes in between. Occasionally in the dream, I get into a bloody fight with another inmate and wake up with blood on my hands. This freaks me out pretty bad, until I realize I most likely somehow bloodied my own nose in my sleep. Other times, I am in a huge riot fighting tons of guys and when I wake up I feel like I have really been fighting, with aches and pains all over my body. I have come out of these dreams with injuries on many occasions. I know it sounds mad but it’s the truth.
From time to time, I will also have this insane sleep paralysis type thing that traps my body. This happens in between dreams and sleeping, when I know it’s a dream, but can’t get out. I get bound so tightly my body can't move, even a muscle. I try to call for my wife to help me, but can't speak, only a tiny whisper. I am completely unable to move my lungs in order to breathe and soon feel like I’m suffocating. I start to have this impending sense of danger, like if my wife doesn’t wake up and then wake me out of this dream in the next few seconds, I will die for sure. It has only gotten to this a half a dozen times or so over the years. But when it does occur, when the dream is able to cycle thru the full strength of its torture, I am left broken, sobbing, and terrified.
Okay. Time for some questions: for starters, why am I suffering from this reoccurring dream? Is it just the obvious answer, that I feel guilty for the crimes of my youth, and so I punish myself with this mental prison every night? Maybe as a misunderstood kind of penance to make my soul right before God? Or is this dream rooted in fear rather than guilt? Am I so afraid of returning to the life of an inmate that I have nightmares every night like a toddler fears the Boogeyman? Do all these dreams mean something? Is it more than a dream? Maybe this is a window into some alternative reality where I really am living as a convict, apart from my family? And that's about where I start to feel borderline crazy…
If I’m totally honest, in a creepy way, I feel like I barely escaped the horrible life I had as a prisoner. Almost as if my past is lurking in the shadows trying to hunt me down and take me out. I am more aware today than ever before of how evil I was as a young man. I feel shame about my crimes and pain from my past, and everyday I struggle to believe I am not that punk gang-banger anymore. It scares me how quickly I fall back into old behaviors, almost like a sick little reminder that The Old Me is still there, just waiting to be invited back to the party.
I know in my heart of hearts, as they say, deep down in my soul, I understand these Prison Dreams to be rooted in both guilt and fear. I feel guilty for the life I lived before, and I am afraid I will lose the life I have today. I don’t like to admit this. I wish my faith was stronger. I believe with all my heart, at least while I am conscious, that my life is not my own. I trust the Gospel that promises I have been redeemed by God and my sins are forgiven. But no matter how much I declare this, the dreams still come.
To make these nightmares stop, I need to be able to be honest and be open about my past. I am confident, when we express our guilts and fears, they lose power and eventually they disintegrate. No question, I’m trying to knock out a big one here, and it’s bound to get harder before it gets easier. But I can testify, when we choose transparency instead of hiding, and we choose authenticity instead of lies, we will allow others to help, and we will conquer our demons.
So this is me trying to conquer my demons. I’m done with these dreams wrecking my sleep night after night. So I am telling my story because I believe in the power of transparency. I never planned to write about dreams, but apparently this was something I had to do in order to move forward on my journey. This is not a story about how to fix your bad dreams because honestly, I am still having them. This is just my story, an honest account of what I’m going through because I believe life is better with help. To get help, you need to let people in, and you need to let stuff out. The one thing I know for sure after finishing this story, is that I need to start writing about my time incarcerated as a kid. As difficult as it will be to unearth those memories, I know it’s time to tell that part of my story.
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