How Clown Saved Me (1/4)

From My Nightmares

The nightmares are back.

It feels like I’ve hardly slept for the past week or so; days droll by with my eyes drooping in gloom and my heart racing like a lost hummingbird. I haven’t had nightmares in some time, but when they come, it shatters me. Last night it was about my dearly departed Dad; we had moved somewhere new, and he had refused to give me a bed and took away my phone. With an abundance of small cruelties, he broke what I thought we had in an unscrupulous manner that reflected only the darkest parts I had known of him. Seething in despair for being so profoundly misunderstood and trivialized, I raged, destroying the house and screaming in fury, with an intense hatred that in my waking hours sits like a small, sharp, heavy stone in my belly, trying to pierce any guts I have left.

I grieve this nightmarish hate. I resent it and curse it and ache with apology. I haven’t dreamt of my Dad in any capacity for years and years and haven’t seen him in longer. Now, for the last memory I have to be dreamt up with such distaste feels like a great betrayal of not only my subconscious but the universe itself.

My parents started taking me to therapists when I was a pre-teen and acting out, namely towards my mother. They were all women and overly warm with things like paper butterflies decorating their walls– to imply girlish comfort and feign successful transformations– I hated each one, and we would not go back a second time. It wasn’t until I was 13 that I had my first really tragic, reality-jarring nightmare, one so unnerving I felt the absolute necessity of finding a successful psychoanalytical pairing. I had always been scared of the dark and had trouble sleeping, but this time I couldn’t quite distinguish reality from my nightmares, and that was a whole new experience of fear that invaded my psyche like maggots in dead flesh.

I had dreamt that my father was raping my mother from behind in their bedroom of our new house. I opened their screen door from our foyer, walked in with a gun and with both of their heads facing me, shot him in his. Blood and brains and skull exploded over the two of us left alive. Obviously, that absolutely in no way happened. None of the particles of this dreamt event had ever even sort of been established in my actual reality; I had never seen a real gun, my parents never had any power struggles– and certainly no physical altercations or sexual interactions in front of me– and my Dad was an extraordinarily kind and tame man of service to our family. None of it had happened, yet I was terrified of him and myself. The violence I had experienced shook me to my core. In a way, this dream corrupted my trust in myself. I had always had trust issues, but never towards me.

And so, a panic set in. While nightmares became common, we hunted for a psychologist that could help. One did, a little. Only to promptly stop seeing me when I missed the bus and didn’t get there on time. Even though I knew then how ruthless that was– to cut a new and needy client after one missed appointment when she was just 13 and expected to catch a city bus in the middle of a school day to downtown Honolulu and back– it stung. Very much. My abandonment issues flared, and I refused to bond with another psychologist for a very long time. And so, psychiatrists became the school’s solution. Their attempts to pump me full of drugs only sort of helped; helped fuel a drug-numbing, white-knuckling pattern of behavior that dictated my entire high school and college experience.

I am relieved that I have healed so much since then; it has been some years since I have struggled with nightmares. Clown helped tremendously. Clown work is work to integrate shadow, face our fears, and find our love for ourselves. There is no white-knuckling that works on stage. And if you fail and experience rejection from the audience, you have to keep trying until you win them over. There is no giving up. There is only failing and hoping to succeed until you do.

It is difficult work that tunnels into your deepest wounds, earliest memories, and greatest fears. Tunnels into them with a ferocious leap of faith and landing of brilliant celebration, I might add. Burrowing so far into ourselves with the support of the clown is the greatest medicine I have ever known.

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