By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
—T.S. Eliot
Drowning with Sirens
"It's not escapist to dream, Liam."
Silas was being patient with me and knew I was rambling.
He fitted me in at the end of the day on Christmas Eve—what kind of therapist does that? But much as I appreciated his kindness I was desperate for answers, and yes, I was rambling but it was a way for me to free associate and get out what was deep within.
"What does it mean, Silas, when I keep returning to the same location in my dreams?"
"The whole purpose of dreaming is to connect conscious and unconscious experiences. You keep ending up in your bedroom and there's a symbolic significance to that. I don't know if you read Anne Spollen's, The Shape of Water, but I like what she says about the significance of rooms—she sees them as a landscape for one's emotions, a biography of memory. Something happened in the past that you've repressed and it's literally coming back to haunt you."
I grimaced. "I know that's true. Most people sleep to rest—I visit my ghosts."
Silas leaned back in his chair. "Tell me about Sofia."
"Not much to tell really. She was the girl I had an affair with back in university. In the dream she had just come out of the shower, bright and glistening as a Siren emerged from the sea. She coquettishly threw her arms around me and dropped her housecoat and we submerged beneath the waves."
"Interesting," Silas smiled cynically, "but incomplete. You left something out there. You awoke in fright because you were drowning."
I nodded. "I always had an approach-avoidance response to Sofia because I was attracted but wary of her darkness. Frankly, she scared the hell out of me."
"What was it about Sofia that intimidated you?"
I paused and took a deep breath. "She was into the occult and seemed to exert some almost mystical control over me. It cost me my relationship with Clare Rodgers because I felt so guilty I eventually confessed being unfaithful. It threw me into a tailspin for a long time. Sofia kept trying to re-connect with me but I was done. I really messed up my life until I met Quinn."
"There's a connection here, Liam, between your past and present. You see yourself as a player—someone who uses women and that aspect resurfaces in your dreams. But paradoxically, you're always the victim. I think you need to re-examine what happened in this earlier relationship and see how it's affected your life."
I left Silas' office with a fresh determination to pursue this lead. Obviously, the past wasn't dead, but as Fitzgerald once said, it wasn't even past—not if it was constantly resurfacing in my dreams.
I had no contact with either Clare or Sofia for the past fifteen years but that didn't mean I had come to terms with what happened back then. Frankly, I had tried to avoid thinking of that time and maybe my attempts at repressing these painful memories simply drove the unresolved conflicts deeper into my psyche.
I don't know if I have to make amends to these women to gain closure but I should seriously re-examine and reassess what damage I caused either person and it might at least settle my guilt and sweeten my dreams.
It won't erase the damage I may have done in the past but it will certainly help in my relationships with women going forward.
Maybe Sarah can help me locate both women so I can at least take some steps toward healing past wounds.