Dreaming of Sunlit Sidewalks

[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]

I haven't been sleeping well lately. I keep having these dreams.

In the dreams, a woman is about to be raped. It's a different woman every time—not someone I know, just a woman created by my subconscious, whose face looks a little like a woman I saw on the news or a recent episode of Cake Boss. And she is in danger.

Last night, I dreamt that my oldest female friend C and I were at some shitty bar having a drink. It was daytime, in the summer, and there were two doors, both of them open to let in the fresh air. We were the only patrons besides a man who appeared to be a regular, who was sitting at the bar. A young woman was behind the bar, with the bartender. I couldn't tell if she was an employee, or the daughter of a family friend maybe—she was speaking to him like she knew him, but not well.

The bartender, an older white guy, old enough to be her father, was creepy in his behavior toward her. Whatever her relation to him, it was evident she thought she was safe trusting him. No—that she felt like she had to trust him, like being distrustful would be disrespectful. Her body language was uneasy, but she was obliged.

C and I watched this all from our table, while we half-heartedly kept up our conversation.

Suddenly, the young woman, who had been chattering away, went very quiet. I looked at her from halfway across the room. Her eyes were drooping. My gaze went to the bartender, who had come from behind the bar and was closing one of the doors. As he started to walk to the other, he caught my eye and held it as a smile played at the corners of his lips but never formed. With a menacing matter-of-factness, he said, "We're going to rape this girl now. So if you don't want to get raped, too, you'd better get on outta here." The young woman slumped to one side against the barfly; she'd been drugged.

C and I made our way toward the door that was still open, next to which the bartender stood, waiting for us to leave. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what to do. I said, "Wait, I forgot my purse," and turned to walk back into the bar. The bartender blocked my way, and I pushed past him. "My phone is in there. I need my purse!" I went back in and I grabbed the young woman's hand and yanked hard, dragging her body across the floor and out the door. I felt the muscles in my back and legs straining, and I began to cry, thinking I might never get her out of there.

This being a dream, somehow the mere fact that I wanted to save her rendered her attempted rapists unable to stop me. Once I got her across the threshold and onto the sidewalk, we were all safe.

That's the sort of pattern the dreams always follow. A woman rendered unable to extricate herself from various sinister venues because she's been wounded or drugged, and me, sometimes with a female friend and sometimes alone, pulling her or half-carrying her out onto a sunlit sidewalk, sobbing.

Lest you imagine I fancy myself some sort of hero in these dreams, it is not a feeling of triumph with which I am left. It is an encompassing feeling of grief.

I wake up with tears on my cheeks, the muscles in my limbs and torso constricted and tight, my teeth grinding against one another.

The rape culture is so vast and pervasive, so comprehensive and insidious, ever changing its form and shape to permeate the tiniest nooks and crannies in even the remotest corners of this life and its every experience. It snorts derisively at my teaspoon, creating rapists and rape apologists and new means of revictimizing survivors, bullying them into silence, faster than I can comprehend. I am overwhelmed by it in every conceivable way.

But the only alternative is apathy, which is a luxury I cannot afford.

Frequently I get emails from women who have just been raped, who just want to know how the fuck to get on with life. I don't know. I really don't. I tell them that I don't believe things happen for a reason, but I do believe that we can retroactively give meaning to the things that happen to us. For me, that was becoming an activist, fighting even when it feels futile. It's the only thing I've found that gives meaning to a thing that cannot be meaningless.

So I stand on the beach, digging my toes into the sand, gripping my teaspoon until my knuckles turn white, and I face the tsunami coming toward me. And I wonder how to reconcile the knowledge I can never do enough with the fierce urgency nestled within the depths of my will to do something.

I have no answer in my waking life, and I've found none in my fitful rest, either.