Dreams and trauma

Charles Jencks dreamlike landscapes, Jupiter Artland

I had I think the only dream I've had about Pigface last night. 

I dream very little now.  As soon as I start to dream I tends to wake up and often can't sleep again for an hour or two.  It's no surprise that my Fitbit shows I get very little REM / dream sleep even while I get good deep sleep. I wonder if systems that do not feel safe enough to do emotional filing in dreams, just don't get much REM. 

Maybe I had the dream because I started to put some of the things that I've learned about trauma in the last ten months, into this blog.  

The dream was set in a Famous Store. I had a conversation recently about that, and in real life years ago I did a work project for the first European Famous Store. Anyway, we had lodgings, my family, somehow in the back of this store, and we were  safe in there or thought we were. Nevertheless, it was a public place and anyone could walk in to the public part.  

Pigface did walk in.  He sat at a computer.  I was standing nearby, frozen. He gave me a truly hateful look. Then he was going back and forwards out of the doors, trying to do something, trying to arrange something. Then I saw him speaking to the doorman whose job it was to guard the door. It was all very quiet and furtive. And then the doorman went away.

I had a daughter in this dream.  The daughter wasn't allowed to go outside because it wasn't safe. But when the doorman went away, she slipped out, and we lost her, and we never saw her again. And I know that Pigface engineered that, that he paid or manipulated the doorman to leave his post because he knew that would happen.  It was all strategic. But also, he could never be blamed because the doorman did it. The doorman stepped away, the child wasn't supervised, the child stepped out. So he deliberately and strategically caused all the damage, knowing he would never face accountability. 

That, in a nutshell, is the shape of what happened without the detail of the accompanying direct attacks from him or social services who he got to take over from him once he was completely blocked by my husband and I.

In real life Pigface did a lot of the abuse work through alliances with extended family, friends and organisations and through lying to them. 

I couldn't make sense of the store at first. I thought the setting was random.  Then I realised it's a symbol of structured systems, gatekeepers, access, and control over connection. The dream put the threat not inside chaos but inside the architecture of power and public performance.  The dream isn’t just about the abuser, but about the machinery that enabled him. It's about a failure of the safety of systems that are supposed to protect you. The Famous Store is simply used by the dream to represent "a safe institution". 

Curiously there is a secondary tale there: I really did work for that Famous Company in real life, years ago.  I was trying to go the extra mile to support an internal team.  It happened to have been recently taken over by someone who wanted to work in the national politics of their country, famous for corruption scandals. 

I was helping that team get more direct access to resources via a meeting than they would normally get.  Usually they would not be in that meeting.  That person and their sidekick saw a way to get total access by making false claims about me so that I would get thrown out. So they did implemented these devious tactics, there was an unpleasant internal trial where I was lucky to be backed up by a sympathetic colleague of complete integrity.  They lost because they had no evidence.  I was horrified by what they had done and that I was then expected to work with people who were treacherous.  I refused and asked to be reassigned.  That was refused.  I didn't budge so I was let go.  The organisation was safe - until it wasn't.  The theme of betrayal that was also a key part of the Pigface saga was present in the earlier Famous Company story too.  Not only was the setting not random, even the name of the Famous Company was not random.  No wonder it all surfaced appeared in the dream.  The brain made those connections between the company, betrayal, the more recent trauma, betrayal and collusion by individuals and organisations, stitched them all together and added in all the other details too. 

Me “frozen” while he “goes in and out” maps a mobilisation/immobility cycle.  He is the threat.  The doors are about the boundaries he kept testing and the doorman represents the many alliance/ gatekeeping figures he used. 

The child is the loss (mum, who relied on me like a parent) produced by systemic failure.  Or the current loss of my sense of safety.

The danger is both in the intrusion itself, and the collapse of protection through collusion by allies within a system.

The dream is not about blaming the doorman, it's about how Pigface avoided responsibility for his harm and how guardians, institutions, and alliances enabled that, refused to see what he was doing, refused to look, to investigate and even masqueraded, as he did, as protection.   He camouflaged himself to appear innocent.  A wolf in sheep's clothing, just an ordinary punter in the store.

What strikes me is how clever dreams seem to be. I had to do a fair bit of cognitive work to see what was going on in the dream and at different levels.  But the subconscious brain just did it by itself in a story.  Amazing!