I had a nightmare as a child. A nightmare that visited me again and again. I've never forgotten it, not a single detail, although if my parents hadn't kept the psychologist's report, I'd probably assume the years had added and detracted from it in various ways. But they didn't. It's all in writing, exactly as it rests in my head.
Roseanne, age four, was brought into our clinic due to recurrent nightmares. Parents report that the patient wakes several times a week, crying for her "wife" ("Lisa"), and claiming they've been separated by someone. Patient insists she "isn't supposed to be here" for hours and sometimes days afterward. There are no further signs of psychosis.
At first those nightmares—their weirdness, their specificity—made my mother scared for me. Over time though, she also became scared of me, and that taught me a lesson I'd continue to find true over the coming years: the things I knew, real things, were safest kept to myself.
