Twenty five years ago I had a dream.

In the dream I was in an office.

It was like a newspaper office.

There was an inner office where the boss was. The upper half of the wall surrounding his office was glass, and I could see him.

It was Saddam Hussein.

I knew I worked for him. 

There was a lot of activity going on.

Scene shifted.

Now I am in a flower shop in the town I grew up in.

There is a rumbling and deep groaning.

Holes start opening up in the floor of the shop.

People are falling in.

There is a sense of justice in the air, something being released that has waited a long time for fulfillment.

I know this is happening all over the earth, as I experience it in this flower shop.

Scene shifts.

I am in hell.  The sounds.

The wailing.

The gnashing.

Oh God, it‟s true.

It‟s terrible. The hatred.

The spew. The hissing and popping.

Oh God. Oh God.

I wake up.

Fully alert. Panicked.

Please don‟t let me go there God.

Whatever it takes, please save me from that place.

And I feel a flow

A spiritual wash

Passing over me

Pouring onto me

Washing off The residue

Of the third scene.

And here I am twenty five years later.

Prologue.

I was the 13^th child of my father.

My father believed that if one did not raise and train his children in the way they should go, then when they grew up they would overthrow him.

When my mom was two months pregnant with me she had realized, three years into the marriage, that my dad was insane. Fanatical. A genius.

She went to see a lawyer about how to extricate herself from my dad.

I had a dream about that once.

In the dream I was with a man and my mommy. There was a rabid dog, a German Shepherd, who was trying to hurt us. Mommy went to someone, the man helped her, and she found out how to have the dog removed. 

Then I saw there was an elephant in our garage. After the dog was gone, the man told me I could tell mommy I saw the elephant now. That she would be ok.

My mommy, in that dream, gave me faith that boundaries could keep bad things away.

When I awoke I knew this had been in the womb. 

Boundaries had been imparted to me in a supernatural way through this experience. I have not had to struggle, as many have, in defining the lines to cross or not cross in relationship. 

Love can cross all lines.

I digress.

So in the middle of the night, when my mom was carrying me in her womb, my dad left. He knew his activities could not bear the scrutiny of the law. He took with him the kids he had brought into this particular union. He also took the baby he had with my mom, the sister who was 22 months older than me. 

But he believed what he believed. Rigidly.

So the dog was not entirely gone. 

I was yet trained in his ways, by him and by others. At night, on weekends, after school.

Every so often they would have me for a few days.

And he brought my sister back when I started school, to make sure I would never tell.

He was good friends with a Frenchman, who was an expert in training.

The training was severe. 

One of my sisters is now institutionalized for life.

Another got involved in a religious cult.

A different sister is in prison, last I heard, for selling her twins and killing her husband.

Two of my siblings have lost their first born to violent death.

The carnage goes on and on.

Sometimes the training involved experiencing things that I was not taught in school. In places that do not show up on a world history map. With Beings who are neither demons nor angels.

There are two types of people who understand, intuitively, quantum mechanics and physics. One group is advanced mathematicians. The other group is children. That was used for their advantage.

When I was a child I saw as a child and spoke as a child. I understood as a child. Yet into my adulthood some of those childhood things have remained, as experiences that shaped me. The language has changed. I can now articulate in a way you may relate to…and I scream less than I used to. 

It is my attempt, in these few pages, to relay a specific set of experiences I had when I was young. 

Just a fragment, in the tapestry of my childhood. 

Chew the meat. Spit out the bones.