My earliest memory is of

My earliest memory is of a dream. Or a nightmare, really. In this dream, the toddler me is on some sort of game show set with Guy Smiley from Sesame Street. Everything is fine until he inexplicably starts poking my lower back. In the dream, the poke is aimed at just the right part of my back to throw it into arching spasms, which actually translate into real arching back spasms in my toddler body. This wakes me up. I’ve had versions of that same nightmare for my entire life. It can emerge from a scary dream just as often as a regular, everyday dream, and there is often little warning. I never link the touching of my back with imminent spasms until it is too late. Someone or something in my dream is just suddenly gouging at my back mercilessly and I am thrown into a horrible tickly agony. The thing is, my body is actually going through the physical aspects of this, and the only saving grace of it all is that it always wakes me up. Sometimes, before I can fully shake it, my back spasms several more times while I’m awake, like the dream finger is still jabbing me.

One of those dreams woke me up last night, and it hadn’t occurred to me until then how strange these nightmares are. Do other people have recurring dreams that manifest themselves physically? It’s not really even the dream that’s recurring for me. I lay there in the dark thinking that if a stranger were telling me about dreams like these, I would assume they had grown from some early trauma to the body that had to do with the lower back. But since my first memory is having one of these dreams, I don’t think my mind was forming impressions before then. Could my body have been? And really, what could have happened at such a young that would have given me such a deep bodily memory?

The other half of that first memory is waking up from the dream. I was young enough to be in a crib, because I remember looking through the bars. My mom was sitting across the room in an old striped pink chair we had and she looked up and smiled at me. So the memory, while having a weird nightmare mixed in, is actually a pleasant one for me, thinking of my mom watching over me as I slept. Last night I felt similar warmth of safety, having J sleeping soundly next to me. I don’t think there is anything more comforting than having someone you love in the room with you when you wake up from a bad dream.

--------