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To Wake from a Nightmare

To Wake from a Nightmare

Last updated on: August 23, 2024 at 12:38 am by Mary Pezzulo

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To Wake from a Nightmare 2024-08-23T00:38:29-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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a red cardinal and another brown bird on a bird feeder

image via Pixabay

It started with a nightmare.

Adrienne got up for school, very early in the morning. She knows that I’ve still got a sleep disorder and often don’t doze off until three or five, so when her alarm goes off at six-thirty, she tiptoes around. Jimmy the mechanic is taking her to school in time for the free breakfast. I’m not needed until she gets back. But yesterday she stumbled and knocked over one of the plastic shelves where I store the dishes. The crash was loud enough to wake the dead. By the time I’d stopped panicking and realized that there wasn’t a catastrophe, she was already gone for the day.

I got some coffee and scrambled eggs, and brought them upstairs for breakfast in bed. Of course, the coffee had the opposite of its desired effect. I dozed back off, with the dishes to one side of me and Twitter still open on my phone. I found myself in a vivid fever dream, the kind I don’t have very often now that I’m healing from my trauma.

I dreamed I was cleaning my room.

My room is an ungodly mess because that’s where Adrienne stores all her old toys now that she’s too grown up for them. Her room is tidy and mine resembles the storage facility from the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in the dream, I was nearly done making my room as neat as Adrienne’s. I’d put in white bookcases in awkward places. They were full of my old books from my childhood library: I could see my stout green copy of Anne of Green Gables and my boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia. I went over to the window, which had been decorated with plastic decals illustrating a Nativity scene. Everything in the Nativity scene looked the way it ought, except that the the Virgin Mary was facepalming. I didn’t know why she was making that gesture. In the garbled logic of my dream, I supposed there must be some iconographical reason. I went to straighten and tidy up the Nativity.

As I fussed with one of the Three Magi, I saw that it was nighttime in LaBelle. Everything looked as it does in real life: the porch lights were on. Cars were parked on either side of the street. There was a pickup truck with a pizza delivery sign idling outside the neighbor’s house, and a delivery woman was getting in.

No, she wasn’t. She was turning over the truck.

As I watched in horror, I realized that a woman in some sort of hijab or head scarf was destroying the pickup truck which is owned by the man who brought water. He’s had that truck for as long as I’ve lived here. Once I accidentally tapped the bumper while I was still learning to parallel park. I ran to apologize and tell him to come get my insurance card if he found a new scratch, and he said not to even worry about it. That was the truck that the veiled woman was wrecking. She took it in both hands like the Incredible Hulk and flipped it upside down, where it rolled to the other side of the street. Then she went to flip another parked car. I looked down at my own undriveable car, and realized she’d already smashed it: the windows were broken, and the wheels and front bumper had been ripped off. There were wrecked cars all up and down the street.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that the vandal was the Virgin Mary from the Nativity scene– the Virgin Mary in jeans and a hoodie under her veil, but still. The Virgin Mary was vandalizing the whole block. She had chosen us as her victim souls and was ruining our lives to wreak havoc so we could offer it up.

I grabbed my phone and fumbled at the screen with numb fingers, trying to call 911. As I fumbled, I ran down the stairs to the foyer, where I saw a chilling sight: the Virgin Mary was on the porch. She was about to smash the ripe pumpkin I’d picked from my garden and put out there as a decoration. Police car sirens were wailing all over LaBelle in this part of the dream, just as they often do in real life. I prayed they were actually coming to arrest the Virgin Mary, instead of on their way to another emergency, or perhaps they’d just ignore the rampage in the street and go about their business, leaving me stranded.

For just a minute, the Virgin Mary made eye contact with me through the front window. We regarded each other: she calm and cold, me panicked. I dove for the front door and threw the deadbolt. What the deadbolt was supposed to do against an intruder who could flip cars, I don’t know, but I threw it. I tried to call 911 again before she tried that backdoor that the landlord painted shut.

I woke up, my heart racing, in my impossibly messy room in broad daylight. And then I laughed at myself for having such a ridiculous nightmare. I dozed off again almost immediately, and woke again thinking it had been only a few minutes. And then, of course, I panicked, because I looked at my phone and saw that it was the middle of the afternoon. Adrienne would be home soon.

I went downstairs to get a meal ready. Adrienne is in sports after school, so she’s always hungry. We tend to have dinner in the midafternoon and leftovers for supper closer to midnight. I took out a box of mashed potatoes, a bag of frozen green beans, and a pan of frozen Salisbury steak, cursing myself for being such a bad cook.

While the oven was preheating, I went outside to check on the garden.

The pumpkin was still intact on my front porch. The sky was bright overhead. The cars up and down the street were intact– even mine, which won’t drive anymore, but which looked fine on the outside. There were no police sirens. There was no rampaging vandal in a veil. There were no victim souls. There was only real life.

Out in the backyard, another batch of tomatoes were getting ripe. The autumn bush beans were up. The pumpkins were fattening on the vine. Autumn beauty and lemon queen sunflowers were opening everywhere, a living fireworks display. The goldfinch and my friend the lady cardinal were pecking at my dried sunflower heads in front of the back window. There was a new bird with them. I couldn’t make out the color from where I was standing; it might have been brown.

The cardinal jumped up to the electrical wire, preaching “chip chip!” The goldfinch fled to the roof, saying nothing. The new brown bird also flew away, making a sound I hadn’t heard a bird sing before. “TOOT toot! TOOT toot! TOOT toot!”

All I wanted was to drop everything and go research what kind of new friend I had in the backyard. I didn’t know how you’d go about looking up the name of a bird when all you have to go on is the onomatopoeia of his call. I wanted to get several new bird feeders and have friends outside my window all year long. And there, again, was that feeling I’m so unused to: I felt happy.

This is just to say that healing from religious trauma takes a terribly long time, and I don’t know if I’ll ever fully heal, but I am getting better.

This is just to say that if you’ve ever been in a cult or a high-control religious group that’s ruined your life, there is a life out there, with things that are beautiful, outside the cult. After the nightmare comes things that are beautiful. Whether there’s a God or not– and I still think there really is– you will see beauty. Whatever God there is, is a God that created birds who sing and flowers that bloom and food that’s good to eat, and you can talk to God here outside the cult.

I still think that God is the Holy Trinity, and I’m learning to love the Holy Trinity as I didn’t before.

I am beginning to discover Virgin Mary and the Communion of saints are my family instead of my tormentors, and that they understand my terror instead of being offended by me. It doesn’t exactly feel safe, but it feels better.

I think I’m going to like my life.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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