The subway

Age three, nightmare.

My earliest dream.

I was three years old and I was asleep in my mother's bed. In my dream I was wandering through a grey crowd of strangers in a subway stop, being bumped into and much too small and terrified. I distinctly remember the setting as the subway at Dong Shan Kou in Guangzhou, China, but the ceiling was extremely high and the lights were bright, until you looked away. Then the crowd of strangers were dark.

I was trying to grab onto the hand of my mother, but she gave me a contemptuous look and shook me off into the crowd, leaving me behind. I kept yelling "Mama!" but she wouldn't turn around, and eventually disappeared out of the crowd. In my dream I started screaming, legs wouldn't work.

I woke from this dream crying, and mom found me like that an hour later after she got home from work in the afternoon. She comforted me for another hour before I could calm down.

My analysis of this is probably from a deep-seated fear of abandonment and helplessness. When I was young I didn't feel secure from circumstances in my upbringing and would continue to have dreams of being abandoned or left behind, all of which would carry on into my waking hours.

Quite an old dream, but I still feel shivers to this day. It must've been that hateful look on my mom's face that stunned me.