FIVE DREAMS: PINCHERS

What remains from erasure is the likely existence of unknown triggers to unconscious procedural memories, which stay intransigently lodged in the client's body psyche, causing ongoing distress and mercurial trauma symptoms. 

---Peter A. Levine, PhD. Trauma and Memory, Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past.

 

These five dreams all have something in common. They express, in different ways, a trauma I had during my abduction. The word pinchers is in all of them.

When I began to cross reference my nightmares, I discovered similarities in these five dreams, and the trauma my unconscious was trying to dealing with.

The first three dreams occurred before my memory returned, and the last two shortly afterwards.   

 

 

DREAM: The Spiders. (October 14,1988. Eleven months before my memory returned.)

 

Suddenly three spiders attack my face. I scream and brush them off. I then notice one strand of cobweb around a button on the front of my shirt. It is attached to one of the spiders.

 

Although the word pinchers is not used in this dream, the art work shows the spider's pinchers are attached to me by a cobweb. 

 

 

 

DREAM: The Spider Crab. (July 16, 1989. Two months before my memory returned.)

 

...All of a sudden I think that laying in the dirt in the gully might not be a good idea. I might be laying on some animals. I see a drain nearby. There is a screen across it and two black widow spiders are on it. I look down and see a plant-like spider crab with long pinchers. It is coming out of the ground and it snaps at my feet. I wake up in fright. 

I asked for another dream to explain this dream. I woke up four more times in the night and could not remember anything. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DREAM: The Spider With a Message. (One week before my memory returned.)  

I stand up just as a giant spider is sliding at me along the wires of a telephone pole. The spider has pincers. I wake up in fright. 

 

 

 

DREAM: The Snapping Arm. (Six weeks after my memory returned.)

Pinchers are snapping at me. They retreat and advance in and out of a panel. My left sleeve gets caught on something and I can't get loose in order to get away. I kick at it. It disappears and then jumps back at me. This goes on and on. We duel back and forth.This dream is very frightening.

DREAM: "Hello My Lovely." (Two months after my memory returned.)

An animal is laying on its back and is grinning at me. It puts its arms around behind its head. I am looking at its feet and that is when I realize the animal looks like a seal. Now that I am looking at it closer the feet are kind of symbolic of a pair of shears...wire cutters. I think this dream seal and its feet are symbolic.

 

 

The first thing I remembered on the night my memory returned, on September 8, 1989, is what these dreams express. In my book, ABDUCTED: My Struggle to Remember,  I give specific details of what happened that night.

I would also like to mention that the spider plant, cheese, and stove, in this art work, are things that show up in other dreams and memories.

After I remembered what these dreams were telling me, pinchers never showed up again. 

 

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Fountain in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. I used a mirror lens for this photograph.

Onward and upward.