I have had this dream off and on throughout most of my life. A brother figure (I don’t think he is one of my actual brothers) and I are playing in the woods somewhere and we manage to stumble into a witch. She keeps us prisoner but not in a completely malicious way. She has a daffy husband who is no help, but who does no harm who kind of tries to make things easier for us. She is evil, but I hurt her and punch her and lash out nearly constantly and she doesn’t punish me. Eventually she tells us there is a way out if we really want to leave her.
By this point my brother isn’t real enthused about leaving. The witch is far kinder to him. I think she doesn’t punish me to show him that she is wonderful and like a boy he is stupid enough to believe. We have to run to the far side of her land and find our way out through the right door in a house. There is no such thing as day or night in this land so we run and run and run and I don’t know how many days we run for. Sometimes my brother carries me because he is bigger and stronger but when he does the witch catches us. She runs with us the whole way to taunt us. We have the right to get to the house and she can’t stop us till there. But most of the time I pull at my brother to make him run faster and we leave her behind at least for a while.
Last night I got to the house. Sometimes I don’t. Last night when I opened the door into the house I found a hallway with three doors. I picked the door in the middle. This lead into another room with two doors and I picked the door on the right. When we got ‘outside’ the house on the other side it looked like a backyard. We hopped the fence to get out of the yard, but then there was another fence and we hopped that too. When we got to the ground it looked like a very generic suburban neighborhood. We started walking and my brother got real excited. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew we had picked wrong and i started screaming and throwing rocks at the windows of the houses.
Then the witch appeared and started taunting me. We were instantly back in her home area of her kingdom and she asked me if I was going to be stupid enough to try and leave again. Usually I have this dream over and over getting more and more frustrated with making the wrong decisions. I don’t really want to get into this cycle.
I know what it sounds like to me but thats rather beside the point.
What it is to you and what you make of it is the only thing that matters.
Let me just tell you about something that it reminds me of. It reminds me of my struggle with my mother. I’m no longer struggling with her. But it took quite a while to learn that I needed to break contact and keep it that way. It was 7 years or more (I really don’t remember exactly) before I responded to any attempt to get my attention. And I was very careful of my boundaries when I did. Well it’s a long story but I want you to know that it was worth it. It being breaking contact. Making the choices I did made me strong. I’m damn good at the boundary thing now.
Presently all I’m comfortable with is letting her email me and responding to those when I want. I’ll let her send me cards too. Coming to that point though had to come *after* not allowing contact for a lot of years. It took her that long to understand that there was a reason I broke contact and that reason was her and that if she wanted any contact she’d have to be very respectful of my boundaries.
Point is evil manipulative mother figures can be slain.
Don’t let it be their playing field. Make your own rules and defend your own chosen boundaries.
You’re gonna be okay hon. Some bridges need burning.
*SMOOOSH*