No One Can Steal Your Inner Power

What follows is a dream I had about a year ago. At the time I was really struggling with my PTSD and feeling too weak to defend myself. My mind was playing terrible tricks on me, allowing me to believe I didn’t have the power to move on. That was my biggest challenge with PTSD, remembering how strong I was, what a fighter I was. Instead, I would allow self-doubt and fear to creep in, leaving me cowering from the world. Now I remind myself often that I fought Lyme disease and won. I’m fighting PTSD and winning. No one else did it for me. I’m a survivor and I have a deep power residing in myself. So do you! Remember, no one can steal your inner power.

This Is Not a Dream

I open my eyes and I’m in a large vehicle, maybe an industrial-sized van. There are rows of seats, each one teeming with people. There are so many people in this vehicle. My senses are overwhelmed by the cacophony of multiple conversations. People are shuffling around and a football is being tossed about. Is that confetti? What’s going on? I recognize one of them. It’s my sister. And I think my mom is driving but I can’t see her clearly through the haze of activity. I think these are all my family members but they seem different somehow. There’s so much noise. Nobody seems to notice me. I’m just another passenger, invisible somehow through their own self-involvement.

The vehicle comes to a stop and I’m no longer invisible. My sister takes my hand and helps me out of the van. It’s quiet now, the din has subsided. The other passengers have filed out of what I can now see is a white passenger van. The type of van that delivers people to church camp. As they step out, they form a horde directly behind my sister and me. It has the feel of a cultist ceremony where I’m the human sacrifice. My mom, it is my mom but she looks different, comes to stand next to my sister and they usher me inside.

We walk through double glass doors into what looks like a factory of some sort. This room, like the van, is teeming with people and activity. The room is huge, with easily thirty foot ceilings. It’s wider than it is deep and there appear to be different stations within. It feels sterile, like a doctor’s office. The different stations must be used for different treatments. The walls are all grey and the multitude of employees are all wearing dark grey scrubs with a breast pocket. Along the top of the pocket is a stripe of coral blue. This is the only color in a sea of grey.

My sister ushers me to one of the medical stations. We step through a glass door and a blurry woman takes my hand. I look around and realize we’ve stepped into a glass room in the middle of the massive room that surrounds us. My eyes are unfocused, like I’m still half-asleep. I feel drugged. My sister is no longer there. The blurry woman is sitting in a large chair that sits very low to the ground. The chair is on rails, allowing it to move forward and backward. Five feet in front of the chair is a chamber of sorts, like an MRI machine. I can see now that the chair will slide forward into the chamber. This is some sort of exam.

The woman sitting in the exam chair grabs my hand and coaxes me into her lap. Her scrubs are no longer grey with a coral blue stripe over the breast pocket. They’re now a deep shade of purple. I’m sitting between her purple legs in the chair. The chamber begins to flash with coral blue LED tracking lights, indicating that it’s powering up. Why am I sitting in this woman’s lap? This seems strange, forced, controlling, manipulative. Get me out of this chair! I didn’t agree to this. My eyes close and everything goes black.

When I open my eyes I’m sitting in a different chair, an adjustable dark blue office chair. The dark blue scratchy cloth of a cheap office chair. The blurry woman, I can see now that she has short curly reddish-brown hair, is standing in front of me. She’s strapping me into the chair. Straps that are thick and industrial feeling come over my head and restrict over each shoulder, clicking together over my waist. The type of restraints that keep you safe on a roller-coaster, except they’re the material of a seat belt. No, they’re thicker than a seat belt strap but the same material.

I glance about me now, through the glass that encases the room where I’m entrapped. I’m here against my will. Why am I here? There’s so much bustling outside of this room. A hundred people talking and moving about. I blink my eyes and when I open them again they’ve all stopped moving and they’re all looking at me. This is why they’re all here. They’re all waiting to see what happens to me.

I blink again and the chair has hydraulically shot me forty feet in the air. I’m holding onto the shoulder straps for dear life. I shriek a blood-curdling scream. Then everything goes black.

I open my eyes again and the chair has been lowered back to the ground. The blurry woman with curly hair is hurriedly unstrapping me. She looks concerned. She’s saying something but I can’t hear her. My ears are ringing. What’s happening? She ushers me out of the glass box into an adjoining room. The people in here aren’t blurry but I don’t recognize them. There are machines sitting on the counter tops. It looks like the lab room outside of an experiment room. Are they experimenting on me?

The woman is talking to me. What is she saying? My ears won’t stop ringing and everything is still so blurry. What is she saying? “We had to get you down from there. You were going to set off the fire suppression system.” The expression on my face must have revealed my thoughts because without voicing my questions the woman answers me, “Look at your shirt. You caught fire.” I look down at my grey shirt and I can see a small wisp of smoke escaping upward, as if a flame were just extinguished. “Look at your feet.” I look down at my feet and they’re covered in something white that glistens like tiny ice crystals. What are those? I stomp one foot on top of the other, frightened by whatever is on my feet. It puffs away like the fuzzy ball of dandelion seed heads.

“You’re too powerful,” the blurry woman says, “we had to take you down. You’re too powerful.”

∼ No one can steal your inner power. They may try, in many different ways, but it’s yours. They may also attempt to put out your flame but I encourage you to stoke that flame. Let it shine bright for the world to see. As always, remember you’re a warrior.