The other night, my brain did something I hated. It took one of the safest people I have ever known and turned him into someone who hurt me.
My late partner was in my dream. Except he wasn’t really him. It looked like him and occupied the place in my head where he belongs, but the person my dreaming brain created behaved in ways the real him never would have. When I woke up, that was one of the things that upset me most. I hated what my brain had done to him.
The dream started with something sexual. He was exposing me to something new, and actually that part makes a strange sort of sense. I’m exploring that side of myself at the moment, although perhaps “exploring sex” is too simplistic a way of putting it. I’m trying to understand what I want from intimacy, where my boundaries are, what feels good, what doesn’t, and what sex looks like for me when I strip away some of the expectations about what it is supposed to be.
My late partner is probably the person my brain most strongly associates with having been able to explore those things safely. He is one of the very few people I can still easily imagine in a sexual context where I also felt completely safe. So perhaps that’s why my brain chose him.
Then the dream changed.
I didn’t want something and I protested, but he didn’t stop. From there it became increasingly horrible. There were different places and different situations, but they were variations on the same thing: my boundaries didn’t matter. At one point I was being forced to work as a prostitute when all I wanted was to get away and go home. I would escape one situation, the scene would change, and somehow the same fundamental violation would begin again.
When I first woke up, it felt horribly cruel. Why take him? Why take someone I loved, someone who represented safety, and turn him into that?
I’ve started to wonder, though, whether I’ve been looking at it from the wrong direction. Perhaps my brain wasn’t trying to destroy something safe. I’m exploring my boundaries at the moment. I’m allowing myself to think differently about intimacy, pleasure, trust and sex, including things where the answer might simply be “I don’t know yet.” That’s vulnerable territory for me, and my brain knows perfectly well that sex and vulnerability can be dangerous. It has receipts. Perhaps, in its own completely fucked-up way, it was trying to protect me.
Maybe some ancient alarm system inside my head noticed what I was doing and decided to demonstrate just how badly it could all go. And because apparently subtlety isn’t available after midnight, it didn’t choose a frightening stranger. It chose the person I trusted most.
In a strange way, perhaps that makes sense too. A stranger being dangerous doesn’t prove very much. But if even the safest person can become dangerous, then the lesson from a frightened brain is much more powerful: don’t trust anybody. Don’t explore. Don’t make yourself vulnerable. Don’t give anyone the opportunity to hurt you.
There is just one rather important problem with that lesson. Protection isn’t prediction.
Protection is not Prediction
There is risk in trusting people, and there is vulnerability in sexual exploration. Someone might misunderstand a boundary or, much worse, deliberately ignore one. My brain isn’t inventing the concept of danger from nothing. But the answer cannot be never to trust anyone, never explore, never be vulnerable and never let anybody close enough that they could hurt me. That’s not really safety. It’s a prison with very good locks.
Even in the Nightmare, I said no.
There was something else about the nightmare that I didn’t notice immediately. Throughout all of it, I knew I didn’t want what was happening.
I said no. I protested. I tried to leave. I kept trying to get home. I wasn’t standing there wondering whether I was entitled to object or whether I was making too much fuss. Dream-me knew that a boundary had been crossed and wanted it to stop.
That feels significant because it’s one of the things I’m trying to learn while I’m awake. What do I want? What don’t I want? When does something stop feeling good? Can I change my mind? Can I say no without having to produce a bloody legal argument explaining why? Most importantly, can I trust myself to recognise when something isn’t right?
Apparently, even in a nightmare designed around taking my agency away, some part of me was fighting to get it back.
The thing in my Dream Wasn’t My Late Partner!
And that brings me back to my late partner. The man in the dream wasn’t him. My brain borrowed his face, perhaps precisely because the real man represented something completely different. He represented intimacy alongside safety. He was someone I loved and someone with whom sex could exist alongside trust.
The nightmare hasn’t changed that. If anything, my reaction when I woke up reinforced it. I knew immediately that what I’d seen was wrong because I knew him. My brain could make something that looked like him behave monstrously, but it couldn’t convince me that was who he really was.
Perhaps the nightmare wasn’t really warning me about sex either. Perhaps it was warning me about losing control: not being listened to, not being able to leave, and somebody else deciding what happens to my body. Those aren’t the same things as intimacy, sex or exploration, and I don’t want fear persuading me that they are.
I’m allowed to explore. I’m allowed to be curious about something and discover I don’t like it. I’m allowed to enjoy something one day and not want it the next. I’m allowed to stop halfway through. I’m allowed to say no without explaining myself, and I get to decide who earns enough trust to explore any of this with me.
My brain can sound the alarm. Given everything it has experienced, I can even understand why it does.
But it doesn’t get to make the decisions for me.
And “it” doesn’t get to keep his face. The face of the man I loved. The man I trusted most. My late partner.