The Family Secret

by Daniele Botti

  His words stopped her dead in her tracks, and she returned to the couch and sat back down, her curiosity getting the better of her. “Dream control?” Paula asked inquisitively. She’d never heard of this and was suddenly confused again.

  It occurred to Doctor Sanchez that the best way to keep Paula’s anger in check was to present a mystery, and slowly unravel it for her to keep her engaged in what he was hoping to accomplish; as long as she was curious, he could use her hunger to move her in a positive direction.

  “Dream control is a technique where you realize that you are awake inside your dream. The first step to achieving dream control is to recognize that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. That’s when you awaken in your dream.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Paula confidently replied, thinking back on the countless times that she felt awake, but as an inactive participant in what she was dreaming. “I do that often enough as it is. While I am having one of those nightmares, whenever I see my reflection, either in the water, or a window, or a mirror, I appear colorless, in black and white. Everything else is in color.”

  “That is an excellent observation!” Doctor Sanchez said with a degree of excitement trailing in his usually monotonous voice. “You are already very wide awake inside your dream. Do you instantly recognize the difference between a normal dream and one of these dreams where you see the future, Miss Lindsay?”

  Paula nodded reluctantly, trying to blot out the memory of some of the dreams she had witnessed. She attempted to find a way to create an explanation that would differentiate between the two. “My dreams are very strange. I’ve seen myself in an inferno, falling out of a tall building, maybe the Lindsay Company building. Sometimes, I see myself as a child, running and playing around with my parents. As we giggled and enjoyed each other’s company, a dark shadow befell us and in the gloomy atmosphere, a demonic hand thrusted out and grabbed my parents away. Petrified, I began to run but my small feet wouldn’t carry me far before the shadow engulfed me, swallowing me whole.”

  “Very interesting,” Doctor Sanchez said, furiously scribbling notes in his notebook, trying to keep up with everything that Paula was telling him about her dreams.

  “The most recent dream I had was about a plane crash. I was standing in the aisle of the plane and it was pandemonium. Normally when I have a dream like this, I feel everything that all the victims would be feeling. So, if they’re all scared, I felt that. If they’re in physical pain, I felt that too.” Paula looked at the floor in shame. “Sometimes when they don’t die right away, I feel that prolonged agony that they’re going through and I wish that they’d just get it over with.”

  “Alright, but have you ever taken control of things in your dreams and prevent these accidents from happening?”

  Paula didn’t understand what Doctor Sanchez was asking of her and expressed her frustration. “And how do you propose that I do that?” Paula asked in an exasperated tone. “It’s not like I haven’t tried.”

  “How have you interacted with the situation?” Doctor Sanchez asked, still scrawling words into that notebook of his.

  “I see these things happen, and they’re not just freak occurrences. They are very real to me. I yell for them to move, to get out of the way, and to look behind them. I try to warn them, but they never hear me, and they all die anyway.”

  Tears began welling up in Paula’s eyes as she took a moment of silence to articulate what she was feeling. It was difficult for her to form words as she recounted the tale of her most recent fatal tragedy.

  “Last week I had a dream that a woman was killed by a car,” she struggled to get the words out. “I watched it, and I screamed for somebody to help that child when the stroller began rolling, but nobody could hear me. The baby carriage… it rolled down the hill. And the aunt, well she didn’t see it at first. Before the driver even pulled out onto that street, I knew that he was a man, I knew that he was engaged to be married and that he was going to spill his coffee all over his lap. I… I could sense the car… it was … out of control. I knew he had to steer back the other direction…to, you know, avoid an oncoming vehicle. And I could see him yanking the steering wheel hard to the right, and too far… he sailed across the other lane and into the tree. I could hear the split-second cry of the aunt amidst the terrible screeching of metal… being twisted and deformed around the tree. I can still hear it. You don’t forget a sound like that. I can still hear the aunt’s cries of agony as life leaked from her body. I screamed as hard as I could for them to move, and it was like nobody heard me. My efforts were completely useless.”

  Tears began flowing freely, streaming down her cheeks and dripping off her jaw and into her lap. Doctor Sanchez reached over and plucked a tissue from the box and offered it to her. She extended her hand, taking the tissue and dabbing her eyes with it.

  “Miss Lindsay?” Doctor Sanchez addressed her, sensitive to her emotional state. “Are you ready to learn to take control of your nightmares?”

  Paula sobbed quietly, “Please, just make it stop. I can’t do this anymore.”

  Another moment of silence passed between them as Doctor Sanchez nodded his head slowly. “Paula, I can’t make it stop. The ability to see these things is hardwired into your brain,” Doctor Sanchez said remorsefully and with a degree of compassion Paula hadn’t experienced from her previous psychologists. “But I can teach you how to control it so when it happens, you don’t have to feel like it’s your fault. You can change the outcome of your dream so that the real tragedy can be masked behind a veil of secrecy. How could you be responsible for it, if you don’t have the same dream?”

  Paula was still visibly upset, but she was listening to the words that he was saying as she nodded skeptically, acknowledging what he had been saying to her and expressing her that she understood. This was the breakthrough that Doctor Sanchez had been waiting for.

  “I will guide you; teach you how to control your dreams. You will be put under a state of deep hypnosis where I can enter your dreams and guide you through them.”

  Paula was suddenly frightened by the proposition of hypnosis, as she hadn’t heard good things about it. Even the previous psychologists she had visited hadn’t dared to suggest such an idea.

  “Hypnosis? Couldn’t that be… dangerous?”

  “No, Miss Lindsay,” Doctor Sanchez laughed, “Not at all. The public is widely misinformed on the uses of hypnosis. The perception they have on it is formed by what they see on television and in the movies. You should know that I specialize in dream therapy and that this is a very common technique in my practice. I can solve many dream-related problems by the simple use of hypnosis. I’ve helped a lot of my psychotic patients with it. This problem is no different.”

  Doctor Sanchez stood up and walked back out to his desk, bringing back a packet of consent forms and credentials, complete with comments from former patients who had nothing but praise for him and his work. “You can take this home and look over it with your aunt. You are not a minor, so you should pay special attention to the last page of this packet. This is an authorization form that I need your aunt to sign before we can continue any further therapy of this kind.”

  Doctor Sanchez handed the packet to Paula who extended her arm and accepted it cautiously.

  “That will be all the time we have for today, Miss Lindsay. I’ll have Michelle schedule an appointment next week, provided that you sign the forms and continue to be cooperative. Once the forms are signed, I should be able to get you back to work.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I hope that you are the one who can help me.” For the first time she felt not only optimistic but also a true sense of gratitude.

  “You’re welcome, Miss Lindsay,” he said with a smile on his face, feeling as if he had accomplished a great feat with Paula. “See you next week.”

  Paula turned and walked out the door and down the brightly lit corridor to the waitin
g area where her aunt was waiting for her. She hurried to Megan who wore a very serious look on her face and gave her a huge hug

  “I’m alright, Megan,” Paula stated, almost worn out from her encounter with Doctor Sanchez. “But we need to talk.”

  Paula knew that she had a new battle to fight with her aunt.

  4.

  Fighting the Inner Demons

  The cold drizzle of the rain splattered on the windshield of the 1981 Dodge Aries that belonged to Megan Lindsay. The occupants of that particular vehicle were engaged in a fairly heated debate regarding the ethics of the use of hypnosis in psychology. The argument didn’t appear to work in favor of the person seeking the hypnosis.

  “But Megan!” Paula protested, trying to recall the exact wording that Doctor Sanchez had so eloquently put it into. “Television and movies have given hypnosis a bad name; it’s perfectly safe!”

  “Where did you hear that garbage?”

  “Doctor Sanchez said…”

  “I don’t trust Doctor Sanchez!” Megan shot back, thinking about what could happen if he messed up her only niece. “What if this guy butchers your brain and makes things worse?”

  Paula couldn’t deny that she didn’t yet fully trust Doctor Sanchez herself, but she wasn’t in any position to tell her aunt otherwise. She groaned and rolled her eyes as far back into her head as far as membranes or muscles would allow. Megan gave her a very stern and serious look, the one that said that even though Paula was the youngest millionaire in New York, she was still her niece; she was responsible for her.

  All Paula wanted was for her aunt to understand what an anchor her problem was; dragging her entire quality of life down to the murky depths of an icy, cold sea of despair. Paula put her best confident smile on, hoping to get her aunt to agree with her.

  “But, he’s a pro! He knows what he’s doing, okay?”

  “Some guy wants to scramble your brain and you’re asking me to sit back and watch? I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  Paula had nothing to say to this. She started thinking about Jose, and what ideas he would come up with. He seemed to have a way out of everything, and she wished that just a little of that would rub off on her. Scratching her head, thousands of ideas and possibilities raced through her mind. Then it hit her.

  “You were the one who told me that I had to see this guy!” Paula began, “I didn’t want to do this, and you made me do it. Have you changed your mind?”

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind. I said that before I knew that this guy was going to destroy my niece’s mind. Big difference.”

  Paula groaned again, “It’s going to be alright. Would you please just trust me for once and please sign the papers?”

  Megan was speechless; she refused to give an answer straight away, shifting her focus between the road and her niece, back and forth. Paula had always been very persistent since she was a child when she was in search of an answer. Always inquisitive, Megan knew that she was going to grow up to be much more intelligent than she ever was. She would continuously pester her aunt about the how’s and why’s of the inner workings of everything. There were times Megan had recalled that Paula was a real buzzkill; kids have a way of messing up even the best-laid plans.

  “Please?” Paula pleaded, and tried to put on her best charming face in a last-ditch effort to persuade her aunt to sign the papers. “Please, please, please, please, PLEASE!”

  Megan knew if she didn’t at least allude to an agreement, her niece would never shut up. “Okay, okay. We’ll see,” Megan conceded. “I just don’t want to make this any worse than it already is.”

  “Megan, I believe this guy can solve my problem,” Paula said, looking her aunt in the eye, and placing special emphasis on the word “believe.” “He isn’t taking it away; he’s just going to show me a different way to deal with it. You’ve got to let me try this!”

  “We’ll see, honey,” Megan said. “We’ll see.”

  This elicited yet another groan from Paula, as the car moved down the rainy roads, toward their home.

  • • •

  The silence of the darkened night was shattered by Paula, who awoke from another nightmare, thrashing around so violently in her sleep that she had fallen from her large bed to the floor. Her feet were flailing so out of control that she had backhanded the side of her dresser. In a flash, Megan had flown into the room, flicking on the light switch, and wrapping herself around her niece in an effort to wake and calm her. Paula was hyperventilating and found it difficult to slow down her breathing; the only thing between breaths were screams.

  Megan suddenly experienced something she hadn’t felt before, a genuine concern for her niece’s wellbeing, and a deep confusion settled over her about what she should be doing to comfort her. All she could think to do was to continue to hold her. Thinking back to the previous week, her thoughts of holding her were of restraint, not of comfort. Something had awoken inside of her, a fire and a passion that she hadn’t previously known. Had she truly been missing out on this for all her life as she’s never had a child? Is there a little bright side to the unfortunate demise of her brother, Paula’s father? How could she have been so blind? Without realizing it, tears began streaming down her face; tears filled with years of regret. She was so busy burying her pain that she was causing her own niece’s pain. All the highs she was looking for weren’t nearly as joyful as what she had experienced at that moment.

  She had promised Paula she would clean up her life back at the hospital, but she hadn’t yet. Now she really wanted to fulfill that promise and have something of true meaning in her life. Paula’s breathing and movement had begun to slow down, giving Megan an opportunity to adjust her posture. Her attention turned back to Paula. The shaking had stopped, and she had turned around in her aunt’s arms, and was hugging her tightly. “Megan…” Paula sobbed, “I just can’t do this anymore… I just can’t.”

  Megan felt her awakening becoming complete as she held her niece whose tears were soaking her nightshirt. Paula’s happiness was suddenly more important to her than anything else in the world, and for Megan, it was like seeing the sun rise for the first time, feeling the tingle of its warmth on her skin. She felt as if she had stepped out of the darkness for the first time in many years. There was only one way to get Paula out of this, she had to sign the forms and let her do the hypnosis therapy. She had come to realize her niece’s point of view, and so she took a deep breath and made her proclamation.

  “Okay, honey, I’ll sign the forms. You can do the therapy.”

  Paula wiped the tears from her eyes and looked up at her aunt. Still choking back the tears she asked, “Really? Do you mean it?”

  Megan nodded her head, “Yes, darling. But if things start going wrong, I’m pulling the plug.”

  Megan stood up and helped her niece back into bed. She laid there next to her until they both passed out, holding one another for the rest of the night.

  • • •

  It had seemed that the remainder of the week had flown by. Paula had spent a lot of time by herself at home during the week and had taken it upon herself to do some cleaning, re-arranging, and cooking, having dinner ready when Megan had come home from work at the Brooklyn branch of their family’s company. In fact, the week had raced by so quickly that when it was Friday, Paula hadn’t quite realized it and was ill-prepared for her appointment at Doctor Sanchez’s office. She had looked forward to it all week long, but now that the day had arrived, she was a nervous wreck. One would think that a girl who has nightmares about the future wouldn’t be superstitious about a therapy session, yet here she was, anxious as she had ever been. “Maybe I should cancel,” she thought.

  Sharing secrets had not gone so well with her in the past – with friends or therapists. It seemed like the more she talked, the crazier they made her sound, and Paula did not enjoy being treated like a paria
h amongst everybody in town. Yet somehow, the handsome Italian man was different. Since he was not a native of the area, he was somehow impervious to the influence of the affluent citizenry of New York City. He could apparently set and make his own rules regarding who he could accept and who he couldn’t. She found this very attractive, and though she desired him with every cell in her body, she could not allow their relationship to progress too quickly because of her secrets. Maybe after several months, she could share with him the things that were chaining her to the bottom of the sea of her personal madness. But all she wanted to do was to live in this very moment with him, and not think about what the future might bring.

  • • •

  The weekend had unceremoniously come and gone without incident, for which Paula was thankful. Nights without nightmares were treasured gifts to her; gifts which yielded good sleep. She had not known good sleep; they were literally strangers in the night. When those rare occasions occurred, and they were few and far between, Paula found herself most thankful for them.

  Paula had managed to secure a slot with Doctor Sanchez that Monday morning. More than anything, she wanted to kick this disorder of hers and live a normal life. A secondary goal had grown in her heart like a beautiful potted flower. She was also very excited at the prospect of seeing Jose regularly. With that in mind, she was going to work hard and become everything she needed to become.

  Entering the kitchen, she saw her aunt preparing breakfast. Even with all the wealth the two powerful women had, they still preferred to do their cooking themselves whenever they had some free time on their hand. Paula was excited to tell her aunt that she was planning a visit with Doctor Sanchez later that day, and that she was going to get her life back on track. The two of them had a conversation about it, and Megan found herself amicable to taking Paula to see the psychologist later that afternoon. She hadn’t yet signed the forms for Paula, and she was still uneasy about the process of hypnosis, even though she thoroughly read the literature included in the packet five or six times.