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Rape report in the basement
I dreamt I was in the basement of the house I grew up in. The dream wasn't set in any specific time period, but the basement was as it looked around the early '90s--after my grandfather had died, but before his strict sense of order had been completely swept away. I dreamt I was at the shelves he'd installed at the bottom of the stairs, pulling paperwork from a cardboard box and sorting what to keep and what to throw out. I found a manila folder with an attached document pocket (really more like a magazine) and opened it. It contained a police report about the rape of my youngest sister.
I was shocked. Why hadn't anything ever been said about this? Had Mom buried the report down here in the basement to keep the family from finding out? And why the duplication in the header--"Report of rape rape"? The attached pocket/magazine contained photos of my sister as a teen, most of them of her angry and shouting. I closed the file, as I didn't know what to do: putting it away and pretending I'd never seen it seemed wrong, but reading it felt like it would be a violation of my sister's privacy. It also reminded me of a dream I'd had of discovering I'd been raped, and I wondered if it might be related.
At the top of the stairs behind me, the basement door opened and my younger (not youngest) sister called out to me. I ducked away to hide the folder on the northwest side of the basement, behind the wood stove and near the furnace, before responding. Once she passed on whatever message she had to send and closed the door again, I returned to the spot near some old wardrobes where I'd hidden the folder only to find it missing. I searched the west side of the basement and quickly discovered that a young girl had picked up the folder and carried it off behind the furnace.
At this point, the basement had something of a TARDIS-like quality to it: it was at once still my basement and still the same in layout, organization, appearance and size, but it was also somehow larger in scale, and the basement of a boarding school at which the girl was a student and I was some kind of staffer.
I reclaimed the folder and sent the girl on her way, but I was still unsure about reading the file. I flipped through the photos in the back, working my way to the front, but was again interrupted before I got to the report itself by another speaker off-camera. Putting the folder aside, I went to answer, and it was gone again when I returned. I continued toward the south end of the basement, toward the exterior door, and found the girl in the laundry area, tearing images out of the pocket/magazine. Each piece of photo looked like a faded face in pink, with greenish tint around the eyes and mouth; each looked angry and, I thought in the dream, demonic, though I figured they had to be photos of my sister. It reminded me, in the dream and later when I woke, of how some people cut the heads out of photos when they fall out with people.
I took the folder away again and yelled at the girl. A group of joggers came by, a gym teacher with his class running laps around the basement. He stopped and asked me what the problem was, and I explained that the girl was stealing files and tearing them up. He said he'd see she was appropriately disciplined, and then went to rejoin his class.
I decided to tuck the folder away someplace safe until I could decide what to do, and moved to the southeast corner of the basement, to the workbench and cabinets that were still, in the dream, dry and dusty and well-ordered as my grandfather had left them. One cabinet contained textile factory materials, for some unknown reason; I was about to hide the folder among them when it dawned on me that every time I tried to read it, I was interrupted, and every time I let it out of my sight, it disappeared. Semi-aware that it was a dream and semi-lucid in the dream, I considered that I was being intentionally distracted from the folder, and that some force present (and vaguely hostile) did not want me to read what was in it. I'd worried earlier that I might be invading my sister's privacy, but now I wondered what the dream was trying to tell me with this file I couldn't, or maybe shouldn't, read.
Notes, details and explanations
#1. Sorting out old stuff in the basement of my mind. It doesn't get anymore obviously symbolic than that, does it?
#2. In the early '90s, my youngest sister would have been around 10 years old, but the photos in the report were of her as a teen, and in the dream, this report was ancient history; the impression I get is that, in the dream's timing, she was an adult off-camera somewhere. By comparison, the sister who appeared at the top of the stairs was a teenager in the dream, accurate to the early '90s feel of it, despite being several years older than our youngest sister.
#3. There's no way to phrase this that isn't awkward, so I'll be blunt: if my youngest sister was ever raped, she's never mentioned it, but I did worry for a couple of years during her adolescence that she might have been molested. There was a creepy neighbor kid that local gossip said had been molested and who made some inappropriate suggestions to playmates, and it seemed like she started acting-out almost overnight after hitting the age of 12. At the time, the timing made it seem like a real possibility to me. She's never said anything to suggest it, however.
#4. I was reminded in dream of another dream. A few years back, as part of a series of nightmares I'd been having at the time, I dreamt that I overheard my mother talking to someone about me being raped as a child, and how she'd covered it up and hidden it from me. This dream feels like a sequel to or reboot of that dream; instead of feeling betrayed, in this dream I'm worried about my sister being betrayed in the same way, and also about whether salving my own curiosity would be an additional betrayal. (For what it's worth, Mom knows nothing of any possible molestation, and when I told her about both dreams, she was very dismayed. Sorry, Mom.)
#5. In dream--in the damn dream!--I thought, "'Rape rape'? Is that a typo or a Whoopi Goldberg sense?" That still pisses me off.
#6. I don't remember what my sister said to me from the top of the stairs, or if it was important. In dream I was impatient to send her on her way so I could get back to the file, so probably not.
#7. I don't know who the young girl was. She was wearing a dress and mary janes, in a sort of classic Generic Little Girl Stereotype look, though it seems unlikely that she was a generic girl who randomly showed up to hide files from me. It's possible the sudden boarding school thing was the dream quickly explaining away her presence, though the gym class running through the basement, dodging some old pants hanging on the laundry lines, is still hilariously out of place.
#8. Stepping into the southeast corner of the basement was stepping back through time in a way--it was stepping back into the basement as my grandfather kept it, stepping back into the '70s and '80s. My grandfather worked at GM, and my grandmother at a shoe factory and a laundromat; I don't know what the textile factory tie-in might be, except that old child laborer photos have the same dusty ambiance that I associate with the basement in that period.
I dreamt I was in the basement of the house I grew up in. The dream wasn't set in any specific time period, but the basement was as it looked around the early '90s--after my grandfather had died, but before his strict sense of order had been completely swept away. I dreamt I was at the shelves he'd installed at the bottom of the stairs, pulling paperwork from a cardboard box and sorting what to keep and what to throw out. I found a manila folder with an attached document pocket (really more like a magazine) and opened it. It contained a police report about the rape of my youngest sister.
I was shocked. Why hadn't anything ever been said about this? Had Mom buried the report down here in the basement to keep the family from finding out? And why the duplication in the header--"Report of rape rape"? The attached pocket/magazine contained photos of my sister as a teen, most of them of her angry and shouting. I closed the file, as I didn't know what to do: putting it away and pretending I'd never seen it seemed wrong, but reading it felt like it would be a violation of my sister's privacy. It also reminded me of a dream I'd had of discovering I'd been raped, and I wondered if it might be related.
At the top of the stairs behind me, the basement door opened and my younger (not youngest) sister called out to me. I ducked away to hide the folder on the northwest side of the basement, behind the wood stove and near the furnace, before responding. Once she passed on whatever message she had to send and closed the door again, I returned to the spot near some old wardrobes where I'd hidden the folder only to find it missing. I searched the west side of the basement and quickly discovered that a young girl had picked up the folder and carried it off behind the furnace.
At this point, the basement had something of a TARDIS-like quality to it: it was at once still my basement and still the same in layout, organization, appearance and size, but it was also somehow larger in scale, and the basement of a boarding school at which the girl was a student and I was some kind of staffer.
I reclaimed the folder and sent the girl on her way, but I was still unsure about reading the file. I flipped through the photos in the back, working my way to the front, but was again interrupted before I got to the report itself by another speaker off-camera. Putting the folder aside, I went to answer, and it was gone again when I returned. I continued toward the south end of the basement, toward the exterior door, and found the girl in the laundry area, tearing images out of the pocket/magazine. Each piece of photo looked like a faded face in pink, with greenish tint around the eyes and mouth; each looked angry and, I thought in the dream, demonic, though I figured they had to be photos of my sister. It reminded me, in the dream and later when I woke, of how some people cut the heads out of photos when they fall out with people.
I took the folder away again and yelled at the girl. A group of joggers came by, a gym teacher with his class running laps around the basement. He stopped and asked me what the problem was, and I explained that the girl was stealing files and tearing them up. He said he'd see she was appropriately disciplined, and then went to rejoin his class.
I decided to tuck the folder away someplace safe until I could decide what to do, and moved to the southeast corner of the basement, to the workbench and cabinets that were still, in the dream, dry and dusty and well-ordered as my grandfather had left them. One cabinet contained textile factory materials, for some unknown reason; I was about to hide the folder among them when it dawned on me that every time I tried to read it, I was interrupted, and every time I let it out of my sight, it disappeared. Semi-aware that it was a dream and semi-lucid in the dream, I considered that I was being intentionally distracted from the folder, and that some force present (and vaguely hostile) did not want me to read what was in it. I'd worried earlier that I might be invading my sister's privacy, but now I wondered what the dream was trying to tell me with this file I couldn't, or maybe shouldn't, read.
Notes, details and explanations
#1. Sorting out old stuff in the basement of my mind. It doesn't get anymore obviously symbolic than that, does it?
#2. In the early '90s, my youngest sister would have been around 10 years old, but the photos in the report were of her as a teen, and in the dream, this report was ancient history; the impression I get is that, in the dream's timing, she was an adult off-camera somewhere. By comparison, the sister who appeared at the top of the stairs was a teenager in the dream, accurate to the early '90s feel of it, despite being several years older than our youngest sister.
#3. There's no way to phrase this that isn't awkward, so I'll be blunt: if my youngest sister was ever raped, she's never mentioned it, but I did worry for a couple of years during her adolescence that she might have been molested. There was a creepy neighbor kid that local gossip said had been molested and who made some inappropriate suggestions to playmates, and it seemed like she started acting-out almost overnight after hitting the age of 12. At the time, the timing made it seem like a real possibility to me. She's never said anything to suggest it, however.
#4. I was reminded in dream of another dream. A few years back, as part of a series of nightmares I'd been having at the time, I dreamt that I overheard my mother talking to someone about me being raped as a child, and how she'd covered it up and hidden it from me. This dream feels like a sequel to or reboot of that dream; instead of feeling betrayed, in this dream I'm worried about my sister being betrayed in the same way, and also about whether salving my own curiosity would be an additional betrayal. (For what it's worth, Mom knows nothing of any possible molestation, and when I told her about both dreams, she was very dismayed. Sorry, Mom.)
#5. In dream--in the damn dream!--I thought, "'Rape rape'? Is that a typo or a Whoopi Goldberg sense?" That still pisses me off.
#6. I don't remember what my sister said to me from the top of the stairs, or if it was important. In dream I was impatient to send her on her way so I could get back to the file, so probably not.
#7. I don't know who the young girl was. She was wearing a dress and mary janes, in a sort of classic Generic Little Girl Stereotype look, though it seems unlikely that she was a generic girl who randomly showed up to hide files from me. It's possible the sudden boarding school thing was the dream quickly explaining away her presence, though the gym class running through the basement, dodging some old pants hanging on the laundry lines, is still hilariously out of place.
#8. Stepping into the southeast corner of the basement was stepping back through time in a way--it was stepping back into the basement as my grandfather kept it, stepping back into the '70s and '80s. My grandfather worked at GM, and my grandmother at a shoe factory and a laundromat; I don't know what the textile factory tie-in might be, except that old child laborer photos have the same dusty ambiance that I associate with the basement in that period.
