I still only have 8 kids, right?
Had an incredibly vivid dream last night. The length of the time span involved seems insanely long. It began with us living in the house in Myrtle, MO. I came home from a trip to Little Rock and found all of the kids gone. When I entered the house I heard Julie screaming in fear and pain. I ran into the bedroom to find a guy on top of her, in the process of raping her.
With just a moment to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, decided I couldn’t use my sidearm with Julie there, so I jumped on the guy and a fight ensued. It wasn’t very long until I had him in a choke hold, which I held until I was sure the guy was dead.
The dream skipped the dealing with the clean up of that event; no dealing with police, hospital, etc. However, a few weeks later we found out Julie was pregnant.
Pregnancy
The pregnancy was what this dream was really about. I was dealing with my wife being pregnant from a rapist and making decision on how to deal with it. My sympathies to anyone and everyone who has had to do this in reality.
The majority of the dream was the discussion and decision making Julie and I went through. We seemed to have several discussions about giving the kids up for adoption or whether we would raise it. We didn’t discuss the idea of an abortion. They weren’t fights, with one of us wanting to get rid of it and the other wanting to keep it. They were discussions with both of us discussing things like whether we would resent the kid because of how he was conceived, how the other kids would treat him, how other family would react, and whether we thought we could love him, etc. (We knew it was a boy somehow???).
So my brain spent the majority of the night discussing with itself the merits of keeping a kid conceived by rape. I suppose the benefit of such a dream is that it makes the decision real, it adds the feeling of being an actual decision needing to be made. A theoretical discussion would cover the same topics, but without the real emotions involved.
Decision
And for what its worth, my brain decided that we’d keep such a kid. If it were reality I don’t know if we’d make that decision. Obviously Julie’s real emotions/reasoning would be different than what my dream created for her. I assume my thoughts and emotions would be the same, because I thought it was real this time. Hopefully we’ll never have to find out Julie’s real-world thoughts on it.
Would you keep a kid conceived by rape? Do you think you’d be able to ever love the kid? and not look at him with resentment or anger? In my dream I thought I could, but I don’t know if I’d really be able to. I think I’d want to keep the kid, but I think it’d be harder to KNOW that your emotions would be positive toward it.
Dream and Reality collide
I’ve said before how I can have a hard time telling the difference between the real and the imagined. In my dream we had gone through the fire and moved here to PG, just like we really did. So my dream concluded with us living here like we really are, only Julie had just had the baby.
As I woke up I reached over to find Julie and she wasn’t in bed. So I thought she must be up feeding the new and fictitious baby. I laid there for a good 30 minutes thinking about the kid and dealing with my emotions about him (I think we named him John). After at least a half an hour it started to dawn on me that it wasn’t real. That I still only had 8 kids. That those memories were of non-real events. That is hard to accept sometimes because the emotions going through me were very real.
After stretching out my back and shoulders (often required to stand up) I got up and out of bed. When I got to the staircase it fully hit me that it wasn’t real. JR was at the bottom of the stairs and seeing him confirmed it was just a dream. I remembered that just yesterday I had known that JR was the youngest.
Conclusions…
You mean other than that I’m psychotic???
Yes, I’d consciously kill a violent rapist I caught in the act.
Yes, I’d be willing to keep a kid conceived like that.
Yes, my medication should probably be working better.
Some medications can cause vivid, like ‘real’ dreams. Or, maybe the conflict was just an extension of your life anxiety…all played out in a different way. Anyhow, it was a DREAM. In reality, do you and Julie feel safe where you are living? Is there a way you could make it safer..i.e. new dead bolt locks on exterior doors, etc? Do the kids know a key word or phrase only known to you, Julie and kids…things like this. All we can do in life is plan to be safe, know what to do in an emergency (i.e. if a tornado is coming here, we all head to the inner room in the basement with the battery radio). Planning ahead is NOT paranoia, but good parenting/good caring about yourself and family. So, sweet dreams tonight about wildflowers, smelling newly mowed grass, and being in the Temple with your family. We always have our prayer together, and then talk about something funny that happened during the day…that way we sleep with love in our hearts and smiles on our faces.