I had a nightmare of homophobic spiritual abuse. I woke up tense, gasping, like I had been running.
It involved the step-brother I grew up with. I say it this way because our parents are no longer married. He now lives in Vancouver. He came out about a dozen years ago, and is married to his partner (husband, duh) there in Canada. They've been married for a while now. I can't remember exactly when the wedding was. It was not too long after he came out to the family, but they had been together for a while by then, I think. No matter…
The dream setting was a large old church building, specifically the classroom areas. It was a weekday, but there was a lot of activity in the building. People of all ages were very busy doing stuff. I was there with some friends (I have no idea who these people were) and I was waiting for my step-mother to show up. She and her girlfriend were driving in from Vancouver. To the southeast US. Non-stop. My (former) step-mother is not a lesbian, and is in her early 70s now. But in my dream she was in her mid 50s and had a lesbian partner who was 30 something.
It was a surprise to me that her son Charlie (that's her gay son's name) was coming with her. The three of them finally arrived in town in two separate cars. I was with Superman and we were all busy with something, a project that was going on. Vague. So the gays show up at the church looking for me. I wanted to drive back to Vancouver with them, and was trying to figure out how to convince Superman that this was a good idea. There was some sewing involved, too. Like I needed to go with them so I could help sew something in Vancouver. They don't have any seamstresses in Vancouver? Dreams are strange.
Well, surprisingly Superman thought it was a good idea for me to help them drive back to Canada. In either a huge camper-van or a tiny boxy yellow car. Both were available. Very strange. No matter. I was trying to find everything I needed to pack for the trip. It was all stored in various classrooms in the church building. Very disorganized, very cluttered. A lot like my life. And the lesbians got into a nasty catfight.
This being a church, there were some preachers there. One was the minister of the congregation, and one was another preacher who was working to build another church. The other guy had a lot of church stuff stored in the building, and we kept coming across all their stuff while looking for mine. A lot of it was children's craft and art projects. Cute, sentimental, but basically trash. Charlie wanted to throw it all away and I was trying to get him to leave it alone and help me look for my stuff. The lesbians were no help at all. (Sorry ladies. This is a dream, remember, and no reflection on you personally. Trust me!)
My step-mother and her girlfriend finally took off toward home in the big van. That left me and Charlie in the small yellow car. We were about to get in the car when the preachers called Charlie over. Not wanting to be rude or make waves, he went to see what they wanted. Well, they "captured" him and took him into the worship area. They made him kneel down and began to pray loudly over him and preach fire and brimstone at him. There were the two preachers and at least two other men, maybe three, who were prominent members of the church. They surrounded Charlie and were all breathing "holy" fire down on him. I could see them. I was sitting in the little yellow car (don't know what the significance of the color is, but it seemed important at the time) wondering what I could do. These guys were whipped up into a religious fervor and I was afraid to get close to them. I felt horrible for Charlie! One of the reasons he had come with his mother was to get away from home for a while because he had some emotional crap he was trying to deal with. So the poor guy was already emotionally fragile.
I was afraid if I tried to physically intervene I would be restrained and make matters worse. I was also afraid of getting the same treatment. These men knew me as a solid Christian, meaning of course that I believed as they do. Under that guise I had some "stealth" advantages. I could have possibly gone into the group, pretended to join them, and take Charlie away. But that would be rough, because they knew I was Charlie's friend. I began to try to move out of the car, and all of a sudden another one of the men of the church was right there with me, to prevent me from intervening. He started talking to me as if I were "in sin" because of my association with Charlie. He'd been put there to watch me, make sure I didn't try to interrupt. Just that part pissed me off, but then he started to molest me! He was running his hands over my arms, then my sides and hips, then trying to rub my breasts. The hypocritical asshole!!! I was livid, but too weak to make any physical attempt to escape.
At some point I made it into the room where they had Charlie. The poor guy was an emotional basket case! I felt so helpless, and guilty that I hadn't done more to protect him.
This room was not the worship sanctuary, but very large and empty of furnishings. Maybe a social hall? Whatever. I got to Charlie, took his hand, and we began to run away. There were a lot of people in the room, milling around, many with no sense of purpose. Some were for us, some were ag'in' us. Some tried to block our progress and some were chasing after us. And we were moving v-e-r-y—s-l-o-w-l-y, the way dreams are sometimes. I could see the exit but couldn't run fast enough. Charlie was right with me, also not running fast enough. Except his tears. They were running down his cheeks just fine.
Do dreams ever do this to you? You get to this point in the dream and never progress until finally you just wake up? It seemed like this attempted escape took as long as the entire rest of the dream. When I woke up I still had that negative emotional energy in my head. It felt very wrong. I felt such guilt, such remorse for not intervening to protect him.
