Succubi

No reply. Staring. He looked sad or confused.

He turned, startled. His cigarette fell. “What’s wrong?”

“I—” she said.

He hugged her at once. “I know. The dream again. You were—”

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” he lied. “I just couldn’t sleep. Too much caffeine.”

Suddenly, she was crying. She hated that. His arms encircled her more tightly then. “You can cry,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”

Oh, God, I can’t stand this. She felt out of control, which was her greatest fear. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

He closed the door, sealing out the night, then led her back to the bedroom. Martin hugged her once more at the foot of the bed, and then she was hugging him back, clinging to him as if to a ledge. He was a ledge. He was the only thing that kept her from dropping into blackness.

“I love you,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

My whole life is falling apart, she thought.

His robe fell to the floor. He crawled into bed with her and covered her up, then draped an arm about her. That vital contact, his warm body against hers, was all that made her feel safe from herself.

“I love you,” he said.

But the safety was false. In a moment she fell back to sleep, and back into the bowels of the dream.

«« — »»

“I was sick. The doctor said I almost died.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Harold observed. He chuckled. “I mean, it’s not interesting that you almost died. The parallel, I mean.”

“Parallel?” Ann asked.

Dr. Herman Harold’s office looked more like a rich man’s study. It was darkly appointed in fine paneling, oak and cherry furniture, plush dark carpet. High bookcases consumed one entire wall, their shelves curiously lacking psychiatric texts. Instead, tomes of classic literature filled the cases. Only a single copy of The American Journal of Psychiatry gave any clue that this was a headshrinker’s office. No proverbial couch could be found.

“I’ve told you, dreams mix symbols with our outward, objective concerns. Here, the symbol is obvious.”

Was it? “I’m a lawyer,” Ann stated. “Lawyers think concretely.”

Dr. Harold’s eyes always appeared bemused. He had a pleasant face with snow white hair, and big bushy white eyebrows and a bushier white mustache. He spoke slowly, contemplatively, placing words like bricks in a wall. “The symbolic duality,” he said. “Life and death. The notion that you almost died while creating life. The proximity of utter extremes.”

Life and death, she thought. “It was borderline pneumonia or something like that. Thank God Melanie was okay. I was barely conscious for about two weeks after the birth.”

“What do you remember of the birth?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s pretty clear, then, that the dream is dredging up aspects of Melanie’s birth that were infused into your subconscious mind. Think of it as a spillover, from the subconscious into the conscious. We call it ‘composite imagery.’ Your mind is trying to form a real picture of Melanie’s birth with unacknowledged memory fragments.”

“Why?” Ann asked.

“Why isn’t nearly as important as why now. Why is this occurring at this precise point in your life? Let me ask you, was Melanie a planned pregnancy?”

“Yes and no. We wanted a child, that is.”

“You had no reservations, in other words?”

“No, I didn’t. I think my husband did. He didn’t think we could afford to have a child, and I’ll admit, things were pretty tight. He never made much money, I was young, nineteen, I was pregnant in my first year of college, and I was determined to go to law school afterward. I think maybe one reason I wanted a child was because I thought it would make our marriage stronger.”

“You considered your marriage weak?”

“Yeah. I honestly wanted it to work, but now that I think of it, I guess I wanted it to work for the wrong reasons.”

Dr. Harold raised a bushy white brow.

“I don’t like failure,” Ann said. “Mark and I probably never should have gotten married. My parents couldn’t stand him, they were convinced the marriage would fail, and I suppose that fueled my own determination to see that it didn’t. They were also convinced that I’d never make it through law school. Their discouragement was probably my greatest motivating factor. I graduated third in my class. I waited tables at night, went to school during the day. I missed a semester of college to have Melanie, but I made up for it and then some by taking a heavier credit load afterward. In fact, I graduated a year early even with the missed semester.”

“Impressive,” Dr. Harold remarked. “But I’m more interested in your parents. You’ve never mentioned them before.”

“They’re a bit of a sore subject,” Ann admitted. “They’re very old fashioned. They wanted me to assume a traditional female role in life, clean the house, raise the kids, cook, while hubby brought home the bacon. That’s not for me. They never supported my desires and my views, and that hurt a lot.”

“Do you see them often?”

“Once every couple of years. I take Melanie up, they love Melanie. She’s really the only bond at all that exists between me and my parents.”

“Are you on good terms with them now?”

“Not good, not bad. Things are much better between me and Dad than me and Mom. She’s a very overbearing woman. I think a lot of the time, Dad was all for my endeavors but he was afraid to express that because of her.”

Dr. Harold leaned back behind the plush veneered desk. “Another parallel, a parental one.”

Ann didn’t see what he meant.

“There’s a lot of guilt in you, Ann. You feel guilty that you’ve put your job before your daughter because you feel that in doing the opposite, you’d satisfy your parents’ convictions of occupational failure. More important, you feel guilty about neglecting to support Melanie’s social views. Your own mother neglected to support your social views. You’re afraid of becoming your mother.”

Ann wasn’t sure if she could buy that. Nevertheless, she felt stupid for not considering the possibility.

“Since the day you left home, you’ve been torn between opposites. You want to be right in the traditional sense, and you want to be right for yourself. You want both ends of the spectrum.”

Was that it?

“You’re very unhappy,” Dr. Harold said.

I know, she thought. It depressed her that he could read her so easily. “I need a solution,” she said. “The nightmare is ruining me. I’m not getting enough sleep, my work is slipping, I’m in a bad mood when I get home. Don’t you guys have some wonder drug I could take that would make the nightmare stop?”

“Yes,” Dr. Harold said. “But that wouldn’t solve any of your problems; it would only cover them up. You’re having the nightmare for a reason. We must identify that reason.”

Dr. Harold was right. There was no quick fix.

“How is Martin taking all of this?”

“Better than most guys would. I know it’s hard on him. He’s not getting any sleep either, because I’m always waking him up during the dream. He’s pretending that it’s no big deal, but it’s starting to show.”