A Cursed Fate

Date: 2/17/2019

A Cursed Fate This dream was documented the same day I had it: February 17, 2019. The main character of his dream was a little girl. I don't remember her actual name. She called herself Sarah Rune in a video game once. It's unclear if she was using her real first name, but it's the one I'll use for her here. She was a pretty distinct character, in terms of design and personality. She had a strength other characters in the dream lacked. She had a thin body, but an internal resilience. She had long, silky black hair. She had brown eyes. She had a clever mind, when she was in a position to use it and not be bogged down by the things happening in her life. She had a terrible fate. A terrible luck, perhaps. One might even call it a curse of awful, terrible circumstance. Near the beginning of the dream, she was a teenager. A teacher or classmate or someone was asking her about trauma in her past, since they'd noticed symptoms of ptsd in her. She got a bit distressed, then it faded and she was just genuinely confused. She didn't have any trauma. Not that she could remember. She didn't mention, or else ignored, that there was a huge chunk of her life she didn't remember at all. The dream then switched to following her as a kid. Her family was made up of mostly the same people from my family irl, so her life wasn't bad at all. Her dad was basically my dad. He was a bit more dense/oblivious/dumb about things, and a bit less brave, but he looked like my dad and mostly spoke like my dad. Her sister was basically my sister. She was overprotective and overly worried like my sister, but also let that worry get to her easier and considered things to be out of her control much more often -- rather than trying to fix things herself the way my real sister would. Her mom was... not much like my mom, honestly, but she tried her best. She was still kind, at least. She was also more easily confused, with more memory and awareness issues. She was less intense about protecting people, less dedicated to supporting people, and weaker in almost every sense. My brother may have vaguely had a doppelgänger in this dream, too, but he was already moved away and had washed his hands of the family in a way my real brother never did, distancing himself from their cowardice in an act of fear himself. They were like my family, at least they looked like mine, except they were cowardly versions of themselves. They couldn't protect Sarah. For one reason or another, Sarah was left to live with her grandparents after a family vacation to visit them. She was about 5 at the time. Everyone else went home, but Sarah had to stay and be looked after by what turned out to be some pretty terrible people. Her grandfather was like mine, again, but this time that was a bad thing. He was like some of the worst parts of my grandfather, emphasized. He was angrier. He was more hateful. He was more blatantly misogynistic. He hated kids. He hated, specifically, that Sarah was living with them. He hated that she was a kid and that she was a girl and that she was always "in the way," as he saw it. So he hit her. Slapped her. Punched her. Smacked her with anything he had in hand, on any part of her he could reach. A version of my grandmother was there, too, but more confused and checked out than my real grandmother by far. She was barely aware of where she was half the time, let alone what was happening to Sarah. Even when she did clue in for a moment, she just worried about the fact that she didn't know what to do to help... until she forgot what they were talking about again, patted Sarah on the head, and wandered off to do something else she'd forgotten about. Sarah would get no help from her. No protection. Half the time, she didn't even get meals since her grandmother completely forgot they had another person in the house who needed to eat. Beaten by one caretaker and neglected by both, things were already bad for Sarah at this point. She lived this way until she was about 7. Then they took a trip to the store. The dream fell apart here, briefly. It focused on another family for a bit, one that was happy but... again, dense/oblivious about most things. They had some kind of encounter with a wild animal in the store. A penguin? A platypus? A large gerbil? It probably shouldn't have been in a regular grocery store, whatever it was. The family tried to buy it or free it, one of those things. They put it on a checkout conveyor belt, at any rate, tied up and angry. There was a whole thing about how the cashier wasn't there when they needed to check out. It eventually freed itself somehow and walked out the door of the store, grumpy and more than ready to go home. The family just watched it go, admiring it all the way. Sarah and her grandparents went out the door shortly after. They ignored the strange family with the mostly-vacant eyes. I'm not even sure they realized the family was there at all. In the parking lot of the store, Sarah's grandfather proposed a race to see who could find the car first. I know there were more details about this race in the dream itself, but they're gone now. There's only the information that it happened, and acted as a catalyst for a very important part of the dream. The part where Sarah's luck got even worse. She knew right away that she was lost. To be fair, she had entered a giant swamp/lake place. Daylight was swallowed up by ominous, towering trees that felt like ancient magic and dormant malice. There were wood-plank bridges scattered haphazardly across the surface of the deep water. They were oddly precarious, individual planks leaning far enough to dump people in the water if stepped on wrong. Like some kind of security measure. The only light came from strange, yellow-orange flames (a bit like fox-fire or will-o-wisps, but not blue) that sat in even stranger bowls built into the front walls of seemingly abandoned wooden treehouses. There was moss. There may have been frogs, albeit eerily silent ones. Beyond that, there was no life Sarah or I could see. There was only the labyrinth of bridges and the swarming dark of the swampy water below. She fell in a few times, and had to scramble back up on bridges and little islands. She got turned around more than once. "Back the way she came" wasn't an option, least of all because she couldn't determine where she'd been before at all. Her grandparents were horrible to her, but they were still her guardians. She was still afraid when she was separated from them. She still didn't want to be alone. This feeling of being lost and alone, however, was not the way in which Sarah's luck got worse. Her luck got worse not when she was alone, but when she was found. A man found her. He was big. Heavy-set but tall, with a beard and sideburns and a plaid shirt that let you see the denim suspenders he wore. He was like a lumberjack, in some ways, and like someone's overweight history teacher in others. He fished her from the water and sat next to her on one of the little islands. They talked for a bit. He seemed mostly normal, at least to Sarah. He even seemed kind. He talked about how hard it was to get out, and how easy it was to get lost, and how she didn't have to go back. He'd show her the way to his home instead, and he'd look after her. She was scared and young and vulnerable and alone. She said yes, she would go with him. It was the worst decision she ever made. The man, I'll call him George, was the worst person Sarah could have encountered. He treated her like a thing, or an animal he happened to keep. He let out his anger on her with his fists or with knives or with broken plates and other dishes. He beat her just like her grandfather had, but worse. He let out other emotions by using her body. I was able to skip watching him actually do it, but I saw a lot more of the foreplay than I wanted. I saw him kissing her body through her clothes and her only fighting it a little before going limp and giving in to her situation. I was able to sort of "fast-forward" past the actually disgusting parts of what George did to her. This didn't happen very often, by Sarah's estimation, but it did happen more than once. It was just a part of her life. She lived this life in George's run-down little house. The outside looked like it was made from rusted tin, and could fall apart at any moment. To Sarah, it also looked like it was invincible and couldn't be burned down or torn down or destroyed in any way no matter what she did. The dull blue carpet was old and thin, not much of it between her feet and the faux-wood beneath. The actual faux-wood was totally bare in some rooms. Only the bathroom had actual tile. There wasn't much space. She was put in a bedroom that had a small bed and a small desk and a small bookshelf and no windows at all. It had thin blue blankets over white sheets. Even the light hanging from the ceiling was an odd, thin, dim blue color. The whole room was a wash of brown wood and stained white things and a kind of blue that was neither vibrant nor sad... just... small, somehow. This is the room where Sarah spent most of her time, when George wasn't making her sit in the living room for him to look at or go out to the backyard to get some sun (and make it look like he was a normal person raising a normal kid who did normal things like play outside) or go to his room to sit on his bed and take whatever he had to dish out. He'd usually go to her room, but sometimes he wanted to change things up. George also had a wife/caretaker who slept in his bed with him at night (and with Sarah, when all George wanted them to do was actually, genuinely sleep and he would call the little girl to his room for that as well). She was a thin, lanky woman with heavily graying blonde hair and sunken-in cheeks and eyes that had given up long ago. She looked almost nothing like the preppy, self-absorbed, spirited woman with the awful personality my uncle once dated named J.G. -- except as a shadow, that might have had that kind of spite and spunk and malice in her back in bygone days. She was less of a coward like others in this dream, and more of a shell. Defeated and hollowed out. She could muster the energy to be snide to George every once in a blue moon, or to extend some almost motherly comfort to Sarah just as rarely, but for the most part this version of J.G. was just mentally checked out and basically lived as George's puppet. Obeying everything has asked of her. Everything. The reason that included care-taking was because he had some kind of condition where his legs would randomly stop working. They'd be fine for a time, then suddenly become totally paralyzed and force him to use a cheap wheelchair for anywhere from days to months at a time. He always recovered, it was just a matter of how much worse he got as a person while he was immobilized. More angry. More desperate. Even less considerate of others, especially Sarah. He'd even have J.G. help him during these times. He'd have her physically help him do things, even going so far as to support his body while he forced himself on Sarah. The girl and the woman learned that they wouldn't find anything in each other's dead eyes during that time, and so they stopped looking to each other for comfort after awhile. Sarah would just play dead as best she could, and J.G. would look like a crazed, overly-obedient marionette. They would let it happen, and let it pass like a storm. I'm not sure if they ever talked to each other about it, about the scars they shared and the ones they didn't. The things he made them into. I don't think they ever did, at least not in words. Not where he could hear them, or they could hear the shaking in each other's voices they likely wouldn't have been able to control. During these days, Sarah found solace in video games. Some where MMORPGs she'd started playing back when she'd still lived with her grandparents. Some were singleplayer games on a handheld console. Some were phone games. A few she played because George wanted her to, so he could show her off or purposefully ignore her at his leisure. Others were hers, and hers alone. She gave herself any name she wanted, even her own in games where she knew he would never find her. She gave herself power. She could clear dungeons, defeat dragons, get lost in stories that weren't her own tragic one. She loved her games a lot. They kept her from breaking entirely, though part of that was her own strength as well. There was a whole scene in the dream just dedicated to a pixelated rogue of Sarah's design adventuring through a dungeon. It was the only time I ever saw Sarah smile, the expression reflected in her console screen. It was a soft smile, but also a mischievous and proud one as she flaunted her in-game power as she never could have in her own life. It was a good night, and wasn't even spoiled by J.G. checking in on her. She peeked into the open doorway (Sarah didn't get a door of her own), and moved on. It almost felt like being a normal kid, for a moment. There was also a scene in this dream where George insisted that Sarah be allowed to go to school. J.G. argued that it was too big of a risk, that his treatment of her would be discovered, but he was adamant that she go to school like a normal kid and learn like a normal kid. She already wasn't normal by being an 8 year old in a class of 7 year olds, but the papers had been signed and her fate had been decided. She went to school wearing clothes that covered as many of her wounds as possible. This really just meant a long dress with long sleeves, a simple and basic thing that could be cheaply bought or made anywhere. It didn't work too well. The other kids noticed the scratches on her. The gouges in her knees, which had re-opened while she'd been playing at recess and were bleeding grotesquely onto the grass. They saw the cuts on her arms, the bruises on her wrists, the way her body sometimes swayed as if she'd run out of strength. Not understanding what this meant, and thinking she'd hurt herself, they made fun of her for these wounds. They mocked her until she was about to cry. She knew she couldn't tell them the truth, but she hated being accused of something she didn't do. She held it in until a couple of teachers noticed and came over to ask what was happening. When the other kids explained their side of things, Sarah stayed quiet. The teachers, to my surprise, got angry. They scolded Sarah for hurting herself, and scaring the other children. They warned her that their school didn't accept mentally ill people, and if she was really hurting herself they'd have to kick her out. They shamed her and condemned her. It was the first time since she'd been with her grandparents that I saw her cry. It was the first time I saw her cry that hard. She burst into tears, falling to her knees and weakly punching the grass with her thin little hands. It wasn't her fault. None of this was her fault. She screamed and rocked back and forth, crying so hard she couldn't see. Her hair was a mess, her dress was stained, she was still bleeding. Of course she cried. J.G. picked her up from school that day, and swore it would never happen again. I don't know how they pulled it off, but they managed to avoid Sarah being kicked out. She could keep going to school. I wouldn't be surprised if they just told the teachers it was someone in their neighborhood hurting her instead of George, and those dumbasses just said "shame we can't do anything about that, it's out of our hands" and decided to turn a blind eye to her injuries forever. I don't actually know if that's what happened, though. I only know she was an outcast. Other kids didn't want to play with someone who was either crazy or sad or had a target on her back. So they didn't. Which was fine. She could go off into the woods behind the school and rest for a bit. Sleep in a place George wouldn't get to her. Play games on her console or phone. Play pretend when the games ran out of battery. Be a kid. Be okay. She lived this way, a doll and a victim at home, an outcast and a shadow at school, nothing else, for a long time. She was 9 when her original family came to visit her. In the dream, it had seemed as if they'd always known she was with George and J.G., and had just assumed she was okay with these new guardians. They even treated these new adults in her life like distant cousins at a family reunion. Her dad made small talk about things my own dad would have talked about, but with less depth and emotion. He became quick friends with George, at least as he saw him from the outside. Her mom was a little uncomfortable, but chalked it up to being among strangers and not quite fitting in. She had no idea things were bad for Sarah herself. Only her sister seemed to have any actual clue that things weren't as they seemed on the surface. She had an idea that Sarah was in trouble, but didn't know exactly how. There was no way to know. Except on Sarah's body, which was usually covered and/or healed when people saw it anyway, George left no trace of his actions. J.G. made sure of that. At one point during their visit, Sarah's sister asked if anything was wrong. In that moment, Sarah and I both got to travel through time a bit. It was a jumbled mess, and we couldn't make much out, but we saw that she would be back with her original family partway through middle school at the very latest. We saw her in high school, getting her memories of these days back and quietly recounting it all to her sister and some friends from school. We saw her being shocked that she had forgotten, and horrified that she remembered, and hurt all over again as the events were fresh in her mind. We saw her being hugged by her friends, in a bedroom that was big and bright and had colors she liked. We saw her being accepted, and protected. She smiled a pained smile in the present, and said to her sister "One day, I'll tell you what happened here." Shortly after that, the family left. Her sister commented on J.G., but called her by the name of a different (also terrible, though more manipulative than spiteful) woman my uncle had dated in real life. When Sarah corrected her, it felt a little bit like she was defending J.G. and actually felt angry on the woman's behalf. Perhaps she felt that although J.G. was a puppet and an instrument of malice, she didn't deserve to be accused of malice herself -- not even indirectly. Or maybe it was just that they'd endured George's terrible personality more or less together, and that made them fellow victims. Gave them a kind of solidarity. I wasn't exactly sure which it was, just that Sarah was a little angry about the misnaming. Her sister backed off, and joined the family. She still looked concerned, but the rest of the family seemed happy as they waved to her on the way out to their car. Oblivious. As always. Sarah waved back before J.G. nervously ordered her back inside. She shut the door, and returned to her awful life. I guess she took solace in her view of the future, though, because she seemed to have a bit more determination and fight in her than before. Like she was resolved to get to that point, and survive at least until middle school. Until she could go from malice back to ignorance once more, and eventually find kindness from there. Is that a super messed up dream, or what? I have no idea what brought it on, but I feel really bad for Sarah. Part of me wants to turn this into a proper short story just so I'm not the only person who knows how sad this got... and part of me never wants to touch this plot again, because it is so sad and so heavy. Btw, the things I consciously changed/added/subtracted with my writer's license after the fact were: 1) A few things I didn't remember clearly in the grocery store re: Sarah herself, since it was so jumbled it couldn't be put together into even as much of a scene as the family with the weird animal got 2) George's reasons for having Sarah play MMORPG's, since it wasn't as clear in the dream itself but felt like it needed justification 3) George having her sit in the living room to be looked at, since I knew she wasn't in her room 24/7 but wished she could be so I had to come up with a non-mealtime reason for her to be out in the house 4) George having her sleep in the bed with him and J.G. without ulterior motives, since it fit with the flow of how he treated her but wasn't as horrible as the things that actually happened in the dream thereby seeming like both a reprieve and an underscoring of just how selfish and terrible George was 5) The things Sarah did out in the woods behind her school, since I only got a vague impression that she didn't want to stay on school grounds but had to fill in the blanks on how she spent her time instead 5) The specific ages, since they had feelings attached to them rather than numbers in the dream itself and so I had to guess at what numbers would be equivalent