I got a pug for my eighth birthday who I had to put down two years ago when I was 20 due to aggressive liver cancer. Two of my older sisters always got a kick out of tormenting me, so abusing/generally mistreating my dog was the ultimate way for them to terrorize me. I spent many years trying to protect him from them, but being younger and weaker than them, there was often nothing I could do to stop it.

Since putting him down two years ago I have dreams about him all the time. Its always one of two types of nightmares.

In the first kind, he's always in a really dangerous or life threatening situation and I can't get to him to save him. They're always really mindfuckingly graphic too. In one, he got impaled on a fence, in another he was trapped in a circle of strung out junkies torturing him, in another his spine totally broke through his skin. It's always a situation where hes horrifically injured and I'm totally helpless to save him. It fucking kills me every time. Every day that I wake up from one of these nightmares, I'm just mentally and emotionally fucked for the day (or the next couple days).

I have another type of recurring dream about him too. In these dreams, I come home from somewhere like everything is normal and he's just home waiting for me. Im always torn between the elation of having him back and the heartbreak of knowing he died and having him back is just too good to be true. These ones always break my heart, but they don't fuck me up as bad as the other ones.

I have other recurring nightmares-- unable to scream for help, unable to run for my life, unable to throw a punch to defend myself, etc. I have really graphic dreams within dreams too-- "waking up" in the middle of the night to find that I've rolled over onto a pair of scissors that lodged up my nose and into my brain, etc. But these nightmares have absolutely nothing on the hell I feel when I have those dreams of not being able to help my dog.

I'm fucked up.