I had a strange dream (flashback??) that has me wondering about possible preverbal abuse. I had a tough time sleeping last night. I awakened around 3:00 a.m. to use the bathroom, and I could not fall back to sleep. After about an hour, I turned on the TV in desperation and tuned to the same music channel I use to do yoga. Sure enough, that worked. I felt my body releasing a bunch of tension that I didn’t even know I had and then drifted off to sleep.
In my dream, I was a baby. I was crawling around the floor touching different items with my hands and also putting them in my mouth. This was a very vivid dream – like I was really there in that moment as a baby. This is how I tend to experience flashbacks – like I have been beamed into the past that is as real and present (if not more so) than my day-to-day life.
I noticed the feel of the diapers between my legs as I crawled around. Then, I felt someone pick me and remove my diaper. I felt an unpleasant pressure (not quite pain but an unwelcome feeling in my genitals). I screamed out repeatedly, not as I typically do as an adult in my dreams but as a baby would wail.
The dream later moved into my accompanying a friend (as an adult, not a baby) and her baby/child (it kept changing) to court where she was advocating for her baby before a judge. A friend of hers had hurt her baby, and she wanted the friend held accountable for it. Nothing happened the first time, but we went back to court a second time with her picking me up from home and driving me to court. The friend who had hurt the child gave the judge an envelope with a check in it for my friend. The judge bounced the baby on his knees.
When we tried to leave, our car was wedged between the other friend’s car in a very small parking area, and there was a bunch of baby stuff there, including a crib. The alarm went off as I was trying to find a way to move the car without damaging the baby stuff.
All of this has me considering the possibility that I also suffered from preverbal abuse. The earliest flashback I have experienced before this is as a toddler. I was around 18 months old, and my mother hurt me as she changed my diaper. I also have a memory of my mother hurting my sister at 18 months old, so I assumed that was the “magic age” that my mother started her abuse for both of us. However, it is entirely possible that the abuse started sooner. And, if it did, I know that healing from preverbal abuse is a completely different animal when it comes to healing from it.
While I am open to the possibility, I am certainly not “looking” for it. I trust that, if this is my truth, that part of myself will continue to come out looking for healing as I am ready to heal it.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
I have pre-verbal memories and memories in the womb. They are of a different quality. I use the term non-verbal. When I have these memories I see things and there is not yet a word for them. I see them in video with audio and photographic memory. There not a word for warm or cold or even warm or cold there is only wanting something different, same with hunger.
Olfactory is very important.
It is said that a baby can not focus. That was not true for me and I suspect not true or all babies. Each eye sees separately. Perhaps like a bird or a reptile. Sounds are different it is like a force and can be colors.
The two hemispheres of the brain are not connected in the same way.
Things are seen sometimes in gray scale and in reverse image.
I have effects after expressing non-verbal memories. My eye dominance keeps changing. I can reach for something with my left hand and I think it is my right. Most recently my lower body becomes disconnected. When I go to therapy I have to “set” finding my way home.
One think that was distressing that I have kinda gotten used to is I can not speak. I can think in words and I can write, I can not speak.
I got confused with not being able to be mobile and being paralyzed, I experience both. The paralyzed seems to have gone away.
Another thing that I have gotten used to is I can become fascinated. I find that a cloud that is taller than it is wide has a chance to be a thundercloud and that the anvil top is caused by the cloud expanding to the gulf stream interesting. I am fascinated watching clouds. When I swim in the lake I am fascinated by all the colors and the way the water moves. That when I face the sun it is warmer than when I do not amazes and delights me.
It is not average to have memories like this, that is OK some do.
I have found that this is one more thing not accepted by the world at large. I am getting used to that also.
The womb was not a place of comfort. An unwanted child with a mother in distress, nicotine and caffeine. By all accounts my mother is anorexic. She suffered from post postpartum depression.
When that part of me expresses and has new experiences than healing happens. My role is to create a situation where that can happen and get out of the way.
You see as I write I am integrating being in the womb and non-verbal.
I forgot. This part also gets disinterested very quickly. We also need to nap a lot. Even though it is 7:30 in the morning I am going to take a nap.
Hi, Michael.
Thank you for this information!
I have an alter part that is paralyzed. I wonder if that part holds nonverbal memories?? It would come out sometimes when I was playing with my then-toddler son. When it came out, I truly could not move. I always thought that was strange.
I don’t know if you believe in reincarnation, but Brian L. Weiss, the author of “Many Lives, Many Masters” and other reincarnation books, talks about clients who recover memories from the womb. His experience working with these people is that the spirit is not confined to the body in the womb, so it can move outside of the mother’s body. For example, one person recovered very detailed memories of an apartment where the mother lived while pregnant, but the client had never been in that apartment after birth. The client’s mother verified the accuracy of the memories and was amazed because she knew the client had NEVER been in that apartment after birth.
- Faith
Thank you for sharing this. I can’t tell you how comforting it is to hear what you remembered. Thank you.
Hi, CC.
So, this sounds like a flashback to you? I am guessing it is because I do not typically dream (or think about) putting things in my mouth and crawling around. It really did feel like I was in a baby’s body.
- Faith
My earliest memories are from before I was two… but i would not doubt that there was abuse before that.
I had pretty much dealt with and gotten past the abuse I remembered from up to about age four. recently I remembered things (worse things) from ages 5 and 6. It sucks to have it come up again. I told my therapist it feels so hopeless. I thought I was nearly done with that old stuff and I’ve worked so hard and now it’s like I’m back at square one.
She said,
It won’t go on forever.. it isn’t going to come up an infinite number of times. there will be an end.
It made me feel a little less hopeless. Maybe it will help you feel like this is more managable, too. It’s like you said – it will either come up as a poiece of your truth or it won’t. Either way, it doesn’t change the present.
I know that in the last 2 years I have had 5 dreams which are of a very different quality to other dreams. I don’t know if they are flashbacks or not, but I try to hold onto the uncertainty and not get too hung up on whether they are literal (i.e. flashbacks) or a metaphor/reflection of a feeling (not obsessing about whether they are true or not is easier said than done!) Anyway the difference is that, when I wake from the different kind of dreams (that I think are more like flashbacks) is that it feels like they are a total entity, that I remember in vivid detail (like I can write a whole side of paper on a single dream). So when I wake from a normal dream, it feels hazy and I often remember one thing followed by another, and then as I remember them I start to remember more of the dream. However over the course of the day the detail fades and I don’t really think about it that much. However with these other kind of dreams, I remember the whole thing straight away, like a complete package, and it feels like it is stored in my brain like a normal memory. And I can NOT forget about it – no matter how hard I try. I have written them down days later and then rewritten them down months later and it’s EXACTLY the same. Sometimes I’ve gone back and the links between stuff that happened and what came up in those dreams is incredibly similar. I personally feel like these dreams either start to prepare me for other flashbacks/memories – because in a way in a dream it is one step removed or I get flashbacks.memories of the visual detail, but the dreams are the way in which I experience the emotional detail. So when I have remembered some things I don’t feel anything about it. But in the dream I feel the feelings. Again possibly a “safer” way to remember those feelings.
The other thing is that with most “normal” dreams I am general an adult in them. Even if I look younger in the dream, I still feel like adult me but in the body of a younger person. However with these different dreams, I feel the age I am in the dream. And everything fits with being that size – so for example in a dream I am about 5, and everything I see is from the height of being that size – so everything is at the eye level that a 5 year old would be. The words I say are as a 5 year old would. So your description of feeling a baby make sense.
In terms of preverbal memories, I REALLY struggle with this whole area for myself. And is something that has been coming up recently especially to do with my mother. There are things which would fit with having been hurt at a pre-verbal age. Not just feelings with no words, as I think I have them from later too, when I felt something but still didn’t have the words for it. But I mean more associations that I have always felt/made that just would suggest that they were made VERY young. But I don’t know. I am trying to hold onto the fact I may well never know, but I struggle with not believing myself because I don’t know.
Sorry I don’t know if this makes any sense.
beautifulstones–
Your message makes sense to me. I have two different types of dreams, too. Sometimes they’re more like snapshots or short video footage (I call these flashbacks) and there isn’t that nonsensical ‘plot’ to them like my other dreams seem to have (“…And then this happened, and then that happened and then I don’t know know how but all of a sudden I was in a different place or So-and-So changed and turned into an ostrich and this really scary thing happened…”). The flashbacks are more like situations or scenes, and in them I feel like I’m both a detached watcher of the scene and the child ‘starring’ in the scene. They feel more real than the other dreams because magical, nonsensical, morphing stuff doesn’t happen in them. I have very few flashbacks compared to the number of dreams I get, so they really stand out.
My flashback dreams seem more realistic/literal (like they’re possibly memories) but they lack physical sensations and emotions; the regular dreams seem supernatural and metaphorical but are more apt to include feelings I know I’ve felt before. I’ll think, “Yes, I can own that! …But when did I feel that way?!” Also, I’ll have people in my dreams and feel I know them or should know them, but I can’t think who it was, can’t give him/her a name. It’s almost like someone I knew whose face has been disguised, or that it’s a composite person; a couple people I knew who might’ve played similar roles in my life blended together. In my flashback dreams, I don’t see faces to be able to identify who the people are doing things to the child me.
I too get very confused trying to know how much stock I should put in my dreams/flashbacks. I’m trying to think of them as small parts or puzzle pieces trying to create a whole. I’m trying to see the forest and not worry so much about how to take each little tree. It’s hard.
Like you say, though, I wonder if I’ll ever know what’s true, what to believe or what’s just a crazy dream. How do you know if something is a memory when physical sensations, emotions, and images aren’t linked together to give things a totally real and whole feel? I’ve yet to have a single flashback, sleeping or waking, where all those things came together so that I can say, YES, I remember that. Yet the themes and/or settings of my dreams can be so consistent that it’s hard to disregard them as meaningless. Symbols reoccur eerily, and the same people are in so many of my dreams. The dreams definitely seem to pointing to something, yet I feel too dense to get what they’re saying!
Right now they’re all I have, though, and I do feel they’re guiding me–somewhere. I just wish they weren’t so patient with me. I wish they would bust me over the head and make their message obvious.