Cutter (old post)

I have heard about recurring dreams, but I don't have them. I have had recurring themes, or places in my dreams, I have also had one dream that I have remembered for 25 years. I may have told you this before - but I had a very strange dream when I was very young. I was probably 4 or 5. Picture the scenery like you would see in a Tim Burton movie - because that is how I saw it (before I even knew who Tim Burton was). In this dream I went with my mom to a very tall building. I couldn't even count the stories, but the base of the building wasn't that big. The whole first floor of the building was a waiting room. We both went in and sat down and waited patiently. I wasn't sure what we were waiting for, I was just there. A nurse came out and called my mom's name. She told me to just wait. A few minutes later this huge, fat, ugly woman came into the waiting room with about 19 kids of various ages, and stages of dirty. She went to the receptionist's window and spoke with her a bit. The receptionist pointed at me and the large untidy woman with 18 too many kids came over.

"You are coming with me." She said in the gruff voice of someone who smoked way too much.
"No, I'm here with my mom. I'm waiting for her." I tried to say with boldness, but it came out more like a squeak.
"She isn't coming out. It has been arranged that you are to come with me." She said with a snarl.
"She told me to wait." I said with tears in my eyes.
"She told you to wait - she should have said you were waiting for me. She is never coming out of where they have taken her. You are part of my family now" She said with a chuckle.

There was obviously a joke I wasn't understanding. I sat there a minute and debated the situation in my head. There was no way my mom wanted me to go with this crazy, smelly woman with 19 kids that all looked like they had been eating dirt before coming here. That wasn't it. And why were we here anyway.

I weighed my options carefully and took off for the door my mother had disappeared behind. It closed just before my "future family" could stop me. I opened every door I came to until I found her. I ran hallway after hallway, stairs after stairs. I finally opened a door to see her lying on a table . . . only she wasn't all there. And by "all there" I don't mean mentally, I mean physically. Her legs were gone, and part of her torso.

"Mom, what is going on?" I screamed, but she didn't hear me. She didn't even stir.
"We are cutting her up into little pieces." said a voice from behind me.
I turned to see a doctor standing there with his knife.
"It is a little experiment we are working on. Now be a good girl and go back down stairs and leave with your new family." He said matter-of-factly. Just like it is EVERY DAY that he cuts people in little pieces just to see what happens.

I ran up to where my mom's head was and whispered in her ear, "Mom, wake up. You have to stop all of this. Make them sew you back together and we can go home."

She opened her eyes and smiled at me and replied, "That woman down there will be a good mother." Then she closed her eyes again.

The woman I was to go home with grabbed me from behind and started pulling me away. I started screaming hysterically - then I woke up.

*****

Now mind you this dream took place back around the time my parents were getting divorced. In my mind she was my security, she was the only person I knew that would take care of me. Not that my dad was a terrible person - actually quite the opposite. But he just wasn't there. And I was afraid of that same thing happening with her. That one day she just wouldn't be there, without any really good reason why.

Fast forward to the time when I was going to write this post back in May. My mom was having a surgery. When you are there with someone having surgery there is that point where you are with them and then you are asked to leave, and then in a few minutes you can come back. That image in my dream sticks with me when she goes in for stuff like that. That image was there 5 years ago when she had cancer, and that image was there when I walked back in to see her before her last. It is in those moments that I wish that I never remembered my dreams, because I think the memory makes the whole situation much harder than it has to be.