Relentless

When I was in high school, I read a fiction book about a boy in the future who won a trip to a space station.  It was written with total realism, and it described the boy's experience with weightlessness during his time there.  My mind captured the feel of weightlessness so vividly, that when I put the book down, I noticed, for the first time, this bizarre pull of my body towards the mattress I was laying on.  For a second, I was puzzled why I was not floating free, but rather was being pulled into the mattress so relentlessly that the mattress actually was depressed where my body was pushed against it.

Then I realized that the bed itself was also strangely being pulled to the floor, seemingly stuck to it, rather than floating off, as if a giant magnet was continuously trying to pull the bed through to the floor below.  Having lived for a few hours in a world where there was no such thing as "down", and now suddenly experiencing this strange pull of my body towards what seemed like a totally arbitrary side of the room, the somatic feel of gravity was deeply impressed on me.  I spent the day marveling at the heaviness I now felt, and how I could not push off into the air but was relentlessly drawn back to the earth.

I woke up last night from a bad dream where an evil spirit was hovering outside of the car I was in.  I felt that same sense of relentlessness.  The spirit wanted to get to me - it was angry, malicious, and focused on causing me pain and destruction.  Only the car window stopped it, like the floor stopping the bed from falling through.  The sense of a will bent on my destruction was very vivid, as was my helplessness and unpreparedness in dealing with such an entity.

This kind of nightmare I have lived with, almost daily, since high school.  It seems significant to me that the book that came to mind when I woke was also from that same period, and also the time that a troubled older boy lived with us who was often relentlessly focused on causing my misery.  I remember being impressed that the more pain I felt, the more gleeful he became from his power over me.  That sense of gleeful power over someone sunk deep into my soul.

Some people, when they have experienced abuse, go on to abuse others.  Others go to the other side and become champions against the kind of abuse they experienced.  I took a third path.  I associated power with abuse, and never wanting to be abusive, I chose to avoid being powerful.

Thus, some of my life has been a battle between wanting power and being afraid of power.  This is still playing out in my life today.