Sleeping Soundly

The words popped out of my mouth and amazed me with a memory that has been hibernating for two decades. “I don’t want to think about it” doesn’t mean that my brain isn’t thinking about it.

Last Thursday night, I was teaching my night class about narrative and descriptive writing. As we talked, I wove the words “insight” and “significance” into the conversation, two words that characterize quality writing. A person who writes what they know is often a better writer than the person who writes about assigned topics because the individual has a special insight that provides the significance that makes writing meaningful to a reader.

A student asked me for an example, and I had her develop an incident from her personal experience that demonstrated the two qualities of insight and significance. Another student asked a question, and we shared information about the difference between an objective narrative and a subjective narrative, the two sides of the narration/description coin that we examine as part of the course.

Another question was asked, and my response surprised me as, suddenly, my brain dredged up the memory of being startled awake by a man in my room while I was at a summer study conference on the east coast. He was standing there, slightly hunched toward me, and all I saw was his body cast in black from the darkness in the room. He lurched forward and fell across my supine body and began slobbering kisses all over my face.

Startled, I shoved at him—but he didn’t move. His body pinned me to the bed and his arms wrapped around me, holding me down, as he continued to kiss and kiss and kiss. I didn’t know who it was, but I could smell the alcohol on his breath, and I thought I was going to vomit. I thrashed and bucked my body wildly, but he wouldn’t be dislodged.

I tried to scream, but there was no sound, so I continued to fight him as the feeling of being wrapped up in the mattress and held in place by an immovable weight slowly suffocated me.

Suddenly, he went absolutely still. I froze for a moment, and then gave a forceful, full-body heave; he fell to the side and didn’t move. I twisted away from him, leaped from the bed, and ran to the door.

I woke up someone in the next room to get help, but she was sleepy and scared, and refused to come to my room to help me. I went to another door, and then another door, and finally a fourth door, trying to find someone who would come with me to get the man out of my room. When someone actually understood what I was saying, he pulled on his clothes and went with me to my room. I was so grateful and relieved to have help that I then started to cry and shake from head to toe.

When he went into my room and turned on the lights, he started to laugh! “It’s just Mike,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s just Mike,” he repeated.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“He’s drunk, and he probably didn’t know where he was. I’ll take him to his room to sleep it off.”

And that was it. The incident was over for everyone else, but I was terrified. I didn’t sleep the rest of that night, nor did I go to the meetings the next day. I found the director of the institute and reported what had happened, but it was “just one of those things.” I was encouraged to let it go; after all, nothing happened, right? It was the last week of the institute, so I somehow held it together and then came home.

Perhaps I believed that nothing happened, or perhaps I needed to believe that, because I put it away in a small compartment in my brain and have kept the door shut on it all these years. “Nothing happened” means something different to me today than it did at the time, evident by the fact that I’ve been waking up, quickly and terrified, for the past couple of years at 2:00 am, the time Mike invaded my privacy and assaulted me in that dorm room.

We were all adults, teachers, selected from across the US to participate in the conference. For me, it was a special time to study an author I love, Shakespeare, and conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Museum. I rode the trains from Maryland to the US capitol, visited all of the Smithsonians, as well as the Ford Theater, and enjoyed discovering people and places I did not know existed. I saw the Kennedy Center, Watergate, and the George Washington University Hospital, where I was a patient suffering from a wasp sting on the metro platform in Silver Springs, MD, that almost put me out of commission. I loved the underground mall, Crystal City, underneath the Pentagon, and the multi-storied shopping venue created from the old post office. I visited Arlington cemetery and the Vietnam War Memorial, finding the name of a neighbor who gave his life in service to his country. The highlight was spending July 4th on the Capitol Mall, seeing the bombs bursting in the air as the symphony played the 1812 Overture and a plane circled around the Washington Monument prior to landing at the nearby airport.

We ate out often, but also pooled our resources to bring food into the dorm so the elite group of scholars could engage in academic discourse, but we also shared some down time in a college dorm setting, evoking individual memories of our past experiences in a similar setting during our youth. Part of reliving the past was the booze—not much for me, but especially for the guys. Evidently, Mike was quite the boozer, and the night he came into my room, he was operating on a full-blown drunk.

Two decades later, I wake up suddenly and scream in horror as I see a dark shape in the hallway outside my bedroom, a dark male figure coming toward me. Some nights, I am so scared that it feels as if my heart will explode from the forceful pressure of my panic. Intellectually, I know that no one can come into my house without first silencing my dog, and to do that, the person has to deal with my dog waking up the whole neighborhood with her barking. When she has a problem with home security, my dog comes and wakes me up with a quick, gentle lick on my hand, and we both go to see what’s happening. If she stays outside too long and the barking has a growling sound to it that is distinctively “something’s wrong,” I call the local police department and ask them to do a drive-by. I’m not into taking unnecessary risks, regardless of the cause.

The nightmares persisted, increasing in frequency and intensity until Thursday night, when the words just popped out of my mouth and the incident was happening again, this time with a class sitting in the seats in front of me. Speaking the words aloud, telling oh, so briefly, about being assaulted, was a revelation. In an instant, my nightmares and sleeplessness made sense.

Unfortunately, this incident isn’t the only one in my life. None of the events is significant in a criminal way, but all of them have been a violation that offended me and created a defensiveness that stays with me. I am very cautious about including new men in my life, and take offense when, perhaps, none is intended by pushy men who let it be known that they are trolling for a sexual relationship—tonight—and/or find me too standoffish to be much fun. I haven’t dated much because, as one of my friends says, I’m just not available to men who may be interested in getting to know me. She’s right, and now I know that, too.

Perhaps now that my brain opened up the door on this topic, I’ll spend some time understanding why it stayed put away for so long. The least I can hope for is that I’ll finally go back to being a good sleeper, one who makes it through the night without the trauma of flashbacks and nightmares.