Early in the morning, probably as I pass through my last rapid eye movement cycle, I often suffer paralysis dreams. Those dreams predetermine my day since after them I awaken with a very painful lower abdomen and colon spasm that may last for several hours.
The nightmares that I see during this strange time in my sleep, early in the morning, are usually related to being in school. There are three types of dreams:
I am either in elementary school in Russia and our teacher is insulting me in front of the whole class for bad behavior or for bad grades. A lot of vivid details that only a child can remember are present. I can remember the faces of my classmates the way they were at seven eight or nine, I can remember the smell of plywood furniture, of school lunches cooking and many other sensations that I hardly come across anymore as my senses are dulled by PTSD and adulthood. (I went to the first three years of school in Russia.)
Another very common theme is that I am sitting in a classroom and taking a test, while wrestling with my test anxiety. I could never prove my intellectual worth because of test anxiety.
Thus I was placed in all the classes with less intelligent children. This further alienated me and eroded my self-esteem, creating another painful cycle that I tried to force myself out of.
The third kind of paralysis nightmare is that for some magical reason I did not complete some credits and I have to go back to school. Usually the setting is in high school and I am surrounded by younger students then myself. There were times when I made desperate attempts to catch up academically and I sat in class with younger students in high school.
This third nightmare visited me so frequently when I was a community college student that I had to quit.
My current boss, who is a survivor himself, told me that he occasionally suffers from similar paralysis dreams: he is sitting in a classroom and the school is on fire and there is no escape.
Another survivor and a volunteer at a program where I buy discounted produce told me that she had very similar dreams where she was stuck in school. It turns out that this phenomenon is rather common.
I believe that it is very important to study this phenomenon and to bring more attention in order to improve our school system. Otherwise it would continue to mass-produce trauma as any system without feedback does.
Although it is not the school that traumatized me for the most part, school surrounded me with indifference. My ongoing traumatization was interpreted as my personal problem. I was required to do assignments that were both very boring and useless in the long run, was not given an opportunity to show my real academic abilities because of my severe test anxiety problems. I usually had a sleepless night before and after the test and hours of preparation would yield a predictable result.
It would be very humiliating for adults to be occupied by such burden of work that some indifferent authority composed for them, yet children are not given a choice.
I regret that I did not drop out of school because I had to do mandatory school work and then study what I want on my own time, receiving no credit for what interested me.
In the end I am still living on SSI and food stamps because I had too much trauma as a child and school did not save me from that tauma.
Children, before they reach the legal age to drive a car and gain the financial means to obtain one, are very dangerously limited in the American suburbs. Aside from few neighboring children, I was very isolated with my family and my home was the cauldron where my PTSD was brewing.
The only place where I had to go every day and where I was to be provided with the part of life that cannot happen at home, was very indifferent to my ongoing trauma. It obeyed its own metrics.
In high school there was an unspoken connotation that all the privileged middle class students would go to college to finally receive their real education. All the traumatized, impoverished or otherwise "unfit" would just be released into the "wild" and their problems would no longer be a concern of the public school system.
The school system held me in isolation until I was almost 19 years old, it restricted my ability to experience myself in a real world and thus realizing that my future would be predetermined by the abundant trauma of my past and not by my academic dreams and ambitions as it was for many less traumatized young adults.
In turn this delayed my recovery process somewhat and propagated my behaviors that were defined by my unresolved childhood trauma, further into maturity.
This in turn created a very unhealthy delay in my social development and added more trauma and suffering into my adulthood.
I hope that public school system of the future would consider the impact of ACEs on some of the students.
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