Extremely Vivid Rape Nightmare And Subsequent Bedwetting

[Deaf Global Nomad]

Last Friday I experienced an extremely vivid nightmare about my dad flying to the US for an event. Along the way he stopped by my local airport and wanted me to pick him up. We rented a house for the night on a lake.

The largest part of the dream consisted of my being raped by my dad. As soon as he was done he got up and left without saying a word. This part matched my experiences growing up in Greece in particular. However, this time in the dream once I came back from the the dissociation, I regretted having dissociated and really wanted to have felt the rape.

I have no idea where those feelings came from but they disgusted me so badly that I woke up dry heaving and shaking. Luckily I was able to fall asleep again shortly after, despite still being shaken. It was at this time that I woke up and noticed that I had actually wet the bed.

I am still shaking my head about the entire incident, wanting to actually feel the rape (how disgusting!) and somehow wishing my dad were coming back so I could try to feel again (definitely sick), and definitely the bedwetting (which had not happened since I was 3).

Any thoughts on anything are welcome... I am still scared that this might happen again and wonder what those triggers might be. Is it time to go back to pull-ups?

 

[DreamDetective]

Greetings Deaf Global Nomad,

I can well understand the shock you felt from your dream as I too had a similar dream experience, but in my case the bed-wetting was triggered by a different but related event. I'm still trying to figure out what to do because in my case this is the second time within a six-month period where I've wet the bed due to a trigger of sorts before going to bed. And I have begun again after five years to have a hallucination at night. One big difference between us is that I have been dealing with PTSD/incest issues from my childhood from 1996 (I’m now 57). The scary times were, I thought, all behind me, that is, after a breakdown in 2007 because I thought my boss raped me in my sleep (and I was sick enough to email his boss and say what happened).

In March of this year I had a vivid and detailed dream involving my mother and father back in our old home. I was an adult and in my bed naked. I lifted my legs up and spread them, hoping my dad would come by the door and see me. I guess you could say (as my wife does) that I wanted my father to rape me. The odd thing was that as soon as I expressed this wish in my mind to be sexually abused by my own father (I was about four when I was first abused), I felt a hand on my penis. It was my father lying on the ground naked next to my bed (my mattress was directly on carpet). I don’t know how he got in the room without my seeing him enter, but there was his hand fondling me. And it was pleasant, I must admit. The dream gets stranger still. I leaned over and began performing oral sex on him. While I was doing that, my mother walked past my door to go into the bathroom. She looked straight at me while I was giving head to my father, and she did not say a word. It was no big deal. She turned away and went to the bathroom. Shocked that she would allow her husband to have sex with me (oh, but it was all my fault, you see. I wanted it.), I woke up. Rather than wake my wife or call the dream police, I breathed a sigh of relief and just went to bed. That was around mid-March.

In the beginning of May, we had company at our house: two couples along with their young children. One of the children was a boy aged four years old. Now this boy loves his mother and enjoys wearing her shoes whenever he can (something I can relate to from childhood on). While the children were playing, two of the adults talked about how sometimes you are so frustrated by the child’s behavior and stubbornness that you feel you have to resort to physical punishment and even if the child tries to rebel against your disciplining. I just sat there in silence when I heard these words of parent/child conflict, knowing that in my case at the age of four I was taught a lesson not by the belt but by the penetration of my soul, all because I just wanted to be (or thought I was) a girl.

Now I went to bed as usual, going to the toilet first. And it was not like I had many liquids before going to bed. After an hour of sleeping I woke up, not sure why, but I did not recall any dream content. I did feel an urge to go to the bathroom, but I decided not to. Mistake? Choice? In the middle of the night I woke up almost drowning in a sea of pee. I could not believe it. I just took the top blanket, put it on the floor and after pondering all the causes for the bedwetting (none of which were good), I went to bed, somewhat disgusted with myself for letting this happen.

So what do I do? I told my wife, and two days later I went to my therapist (this a day after having splitting headaches in the morning with no dream recall, headaches again at night before going to bed). My fear with this happening now twice in six months is that it could happen again when I’m visiting a friend overnight or staying at a hotel. Once is an accident, but twice (in my mind and bladder) means there is a physical or mental problem. It’s been almost eight months since I got off any medications, but I believe I may have to go back on them. And here is the reason why: about ten days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night because I felt I was being pulled out of bed. This was not a dream; it was real. I turned around (was awake then) and I saw two hands around my ankles and pulling me out of the bed. So even though I could not remember any dream content before the sensation of the pulling, I suspect I was about to be raped. And the reason for those two instances of bedwetting? As a child I could not convince my mom that I was being abused. I tried several ways: wore father’s underwear and pointed my thumb up and out from crotch (got yelled at for that), stabbed toothpaste tube with mother’s fingernail file, stabbed toiled paper, all this at the age of four or five. No response. So I tried one other way. I wet my bed.

 

[Anna]

I think the guilt of the pleasure of an act that is considered to be wrong and disgusting really plays on the mind. It is a rock and a hard place. Going to the toilet is a natural response to fear to make you lighter so you can run away. All animals will do this when they experience terror and fear.

We cannot control our dreams. Damn the subconscious can be so nasty. I also had a nasty rape dream a few days ago which made me shake so badly I woke up from the shaking. The dream was so sick and twisted, I wonder to myself how sick am I to have created it from my subconscious? The mind is a big strange place. Sometimes it makes no sense, it is a rambling of our mind trying to organise emotional events, sometimes it cannot process it correctly. The dreams make no sense at all and even cause more damage. Damn brains.

 

[DreamDetective]

Anna, I hadn't thought of the animal flight or fight response as a possible explanation. Nice observation. I agree about not being able to control our dreams, but I wonder whether some residue of our dreams can control us even during our daytime life. People generally think that our dreams just rehash what happened in the recent past. But perhaps they also impact how we feel and think once we are awake. As you wrote, "dreams (can) cause more damage," and by combining the subconscious with the brain, we get unusual (and usual) behaviors. I think sleep-walking is a fascinating example of the mind/body bridge, not split. Now I'm trying to convince my wife in walk-sleeping: things we do when we first wake up but somehow are still under the influence of a dream.

As for your nasty dream, was this the first time you had such a bizarre dream? In my case, the weird ones go back to 1996 when I was going through a divorce. It was a combination of stress and revisiting my childhood as my first wife kept recommending I do.

Are you familiar with the concept of "sleep paralysis?" Have you ever experienced it? It can be very similar in effect to being assaulted or raped.