Demons Guard the Door

The demons are duking it out in my head tonight. A migraine is squeezing my eyeballs and pounding the walls of my brain. I have felt a duel of some proportion coming on for a few days. At first I thought it was some kind of sinus infection resulting from that cold and small fever I was fighting. But then I realized the militant action was amping up every time I gave thought to the latest series of half-remembered dreams I've been having.

Some months ago, in an NAET session with my healing dude, I experienced the first awareness of a whole mess of memories being repressed. All progress on my recovery, physical and spiritual, came to a screeching halt. Minuscule glimpses have leaked through to my consciousness, always at great cost in emotional and physical pain. My psyche has gone to great lengths to lock these memories away so that I could survive and doesn't relinquish custody of them lightly.

I've been dreaming again of things I could never admit--to myself, much less to anyone else. The dreams are wrapped in the coded language of the unconscious and even so I only remember fleeting images upon awaking. But my body remembers.

All of me aches with the desire to acknowledge the memories. Yet my muscles clench tight in a permanent flinch that forces the horrors out of sight. The battle between being safe and being free rages in my very tissues. My brain throbs. My belly heaves. My innermost parts burn with exquisite agony of knowledge that cannot be spoken.

The skeletons in my closet rattle and writhe. I long to teach them to dance. But they do not respond to my direction for I know not their name. The demons at the door, charged with my survival, won't let me in. They fight me with all the ferocity of the cornered animal I once was.