Woken by the terror of being exposed for a transgression I might have committed 40 years ago, that’s how this dream ended, or did it? The interesting thing about this brain in my head is that although my waking mind might want to escape a nightmare, the brain has other ideas and insists on continuing the journey of working out what it was processing prior to me stepping out of bed and finding enough wakefulness that returning to the stress of what was being dreamt is over.

I was racing through the panic that something that should remain hidden was going to be uncovered, and somehow, I knew that I’d be implicated in what was unfolding. A mysterious round spot of concrete floor had drawn the attention of new residents of my childhood home, “What is underneath that?” Why should I even know, let alone feel some sense of guilt, about this discovery? Maybe it’s because my brain had already foreshadowed that I’d be the likely suspect due to circumstances that would become evident once things were revealed.

So, with ugly anticipation, I stood by in fear as the thick slab of concrete was broken up. Once a small corner has been opened and I’m recognizing what is about to be revealed, a skeleton is coming into view. Immediately, I recognize the clothes and am drawn into dread that the signs are pointing right at me: I killed this woman and buried her in my childhood backyard. I need to escape and run away from the universe that is about to close in on me! At this moment, I wake up, hoping that a trip to the bathroom will put sufficient distance between me and this horror so that I won’t have to continue the experience. I was wrong.

Who was the woman buried under this slab that has entombed her for the past four decades? Why and how would I have murdered someone and then buried her at the very home in which I had grown up instead of somewhere far away? Dreams move in peculiar ways, and before law enforcement is involved, I watch a news broadcast that shows an old photograph from 40 years ago featuring the woman and the unidentified man with whom she was last seen; it was me. I knew that there’d be no escape.

There must be some hint of memory of how this happened and why, but I can’t find anything. Surely, I’m doomed, and I’m trapped in this restless dream I desperately want to end. First, though, I must figure out why and how I’m implicated in something I don’t seem to know anything about. My conclusion is that based on me in the photo, I must have been between 18 and 20. The first clue explaining things comes to mind: these were the years I was in the throes of drug and alcohol abuse when, more than a few times, I had walked through days in total blackouts. Okay, I can’t find a memory of this, as I was likely so high or drunk that the situation was wiped from my mind.

The next clue that knocked at these non-obvious memories was, “Why did I bury her at my childhood home?” Hey, wait, I wasn’t even living there during the worst of my self-abuse. Be that as it may, maybe I did it because I couldn’t deal with the body at the house I was sharing or the apartment I would take later. So, I’m still likely going to be seen as guilty of the crime.

Cracking a hole into the back patio and then refilling it with fresh concrete would have never flown with my control freak father. He would have investigated that in a heartbeat. Just then, I remember that my father had gone to court due to charges regarding the allegation he’d molested a family member, and then years after, another sibling told me that our father had molested her as well. The cascade opened up; my stepmother once started to complain to me about my father. They’d been divorced some time and she was about to tell me about something that she instantly had regrets about even alluding to, and stopped herself short from sharing that memory. What could it have been?

It’s dawning on me that all fingers point to him, that maybe I’d been inebriated, and he offered to give a ride home to the woman with whom I had been hanging out. This would make sense as only he could have allowed the concrete replacement. Maybe he really did have a predilection for sexually aggressing women and girls, and my desire to see my father as a hero, albeit an angry one, had clouded my vision of the monster he really was.

As I worked this out in my sleepy half-awake state of tossing and turning, the gripping anxiety started to relent to my relief that nothing of the events of those days were in my head as the situation was not of my making.