Dreams of Taboo

By Lynette Curran

This book will entertain, inform, and emotionally move its reader and provide healing. It certainly is not a lecture but a look at a survivor’s struggle with certain areas in life that are not so easy for an abuse victim. It is a look at a person’s career in a very competitive job and spiritual growth. This is a troubling subject treated with sensitivity along with down-to-earth humour along the way. It would clear some of our jails and make a safer world, for our children. We’ve recognised, more or less, the existence of institutional abuse of children, but have a long way to go on the subject of familial abuse. It is prevalent and it won’t leave our lives unless light is shone on this subject, which nobody really wants to look at. We will, I’m sure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398469860

Lynette Curran

Lynette Curran is a professional female Australian actor who has worked in stage, television, and film since her teenage years. She has been nominated and won awards for her work. This is her first book, which she wrote not only to heal and release herself but also as a source of information, experience, and education for those who have no idea about the impact of familial abuse on a survivor’s life. The book is not filled with blame but rather carries a serious intention to draw attention from the collective unconscious and create a safer, better world. It showcases her innate humour, spiritual unfolding, passion for literature and theatre, and the art of performing.

Book preview

Introduction

And we are put on Earth a little space

That we might learn to bear

The beams of love.

– William Blake

‘How could anyone hurt a little baby?’ Over and over. But no, it wasn’t a question. No.

‘How could anyone hurt a little baby.’ It was a statement. Over and over.

Apropos of nothing.

Eerie.

To me, dreams are a window into our subconscious. Often cryptic, they nevertheless offer a clue to our best path in life. Like a wake-up call or a knock on the door of our conscious mind, so no matter how scary, they are worth noting down. Years later, if you read through them, they can form a pattern and help to make sense of your life. Mine did and that’s why I’m writing this, because it’s fascinating how it works.

My messages also came to me in other ways. When I began to do readings…my psychic readings…this was another source, through mediums I came in contact with and my own visions.

After I saw my best friend’s death seven months before it happened, I began my psychic development, which lasted for five years and often I would have visions or words come into my mind that I knew were not my own. It was like a type of trance or really just another form of dreaming.

Dreams are doorways to our subconscious and sometimes very cryptic but they show us how to proceed – what path to take, what our journey is in this life, serving as signposts and inspiration.

I’ve always tried to catch them and record them because over the years, upon reviewing them, I could see definite patterns and true revelations took place for me so I am very grateful to them. I’d like to relate these dreams and their significance in the events of my life. Not only have they helped me but I think it could be of interest to others.

I made my first appearance on the world stage at 1:30 am on 16 April 1945. I know this because my Mother gave me the cardboard tag tied with string with such a tiny loop for my baby wrist.

It has Nurse Blenkinsop written on it and Mother informed me when I was older, ‘The rubber perished while Dad was at war.’ I have a mental image of Dad’s successful sperm swimming home when it was not supposed to because they had their family of two boys and a girl already.

In the Second World War, my Father fought in the Middle East and then was transported to Papua New Guinea. It was in Lae that he was shot in the back, up near his right shoulder, and when they brought him back to Australia he was hospitalised and became hooked on morphine that he was given for the pain. He also had malaria.

When I was born, my big brother was thirteen, my sister was ten and my other brother was eight. We lived in a little bungalow (built in the thirties, I think) in the inner-west of Sydney and it had a wonderfully big backyard in which we grew new potatoes. It did bother me that our dogs were always buried in the same place.

,Growing there was a willow tree and a blood-plum tree. Mum made jam from the plums which was tart and she always left the pips in. I loved it. We’d eat the potatoes with butter and the passionfruit and chokos from the vine, plus we had a lemon tree.

This must have felt like a luxury to both Mum and Dad as their respective childhoods had been harsh. Mum grew up in an orphanage in Darlington and Dad was one of ten children raised in and around Redfern. Times were very tough because of the two wars and The Great Depression of the thirties.

Hard for us to conceive of these times today, my generation having never known such hardship. Dad told of the Haymarket days when he would scrounge around for cabbage leaves discarded on the ground to take home to my Nana for the soup. Of the sausage he saved by wrapping it in newspaper for days, and then savoured. Mum told of the woman who ran the orphanage she grew up in, Grandma Patchett, whose own five children would eat their meals, then what was left the orphans had to eat.

It was great to have the big backyard, my space to play in as I grew. Neighbours had dogs and chickens and a sheep called Jopey that bit my finger when I was feeding him, which left a scar. My parents had married at nineteen at St Joseph’s in Balmain and when the Harbour Bridge was opened they walked across it when Mum was four months pregnant with my Bigbro.

As a child, I was skinny, fair-haired and tiny in stature. Mum would say, ‘I bought the chemist out for her.’ We would have some Sundays at Bronte Beach. I’d get so excited when we’d reach Eddy Avenue, Central Railway and join a Bronte tram. I knew we were close when I’d recognise a particular sand-stone cliff and be hit with the smell of the ocean. My sister has a photo of me at three, lying on the Bronte sand with nothing on but a white bonnet.

The house I’ve described was the one and only home for me until I left at nineteen when I married. I had numerous homes after this until I eventually bought a home in Glebe, New South Wales, which was my base. I am a professional female actor and I’ve lived in Australia all my life, except for about five months that I lived in London in 1973. This was after my first Saturn return and the death of my father.

In 1994, my best friend of thirty years died and this death changed my life. I had seen and warned her of this approximately seven months before it happened, so I believe she took me into my spiritual life. I began to develop and practice my spirituality.

I’d always studied astrology; I believe it’s my religion as it has never failed to comfort me and guide me, but after Dani died, I took up tarot, numerology and began numerous other practices. Now, when not on acting jobs or performing, I do psychic readings for people.

This is a reading I had back in the nineties from a superb medium I knew and loved. She knew nothing of my background or personal life.

‘Someone tried to annihilate you…powerful, loud…in a hot bath, far too hot, drowning you…when you were a baby…helpless. It’s vengeance for someone else…being taken out on you. Struggling to breathe…drowning you…but then deciding not to. Someone knocked all self-esteem out of you…it’s as if they put you under their heel and then ground you into the dirt. You had to work so hard to restore that confidence, to build it up again.’

What follows is the dream I had after this reading. I was involved in collecting stories and material for a stage show about child abuse and based on my memory/my dream, I wrote the following for the show:

‘The baby screamed and screamed. The bath she sat in up to her waist was scalding…the hot, hot water still running from the gas heater. The thirty-two-year-old woman stormed in, white with anger, her victory-roll hairstyle fallen limp across her face. She slammed the heater off and pulled the screaming baby by the left leg…hard…towards her as she thumped down on her knees.’

‘The baby girl’s head banged on the bottom of the bath as she gulped the hot water into her lungs, her arms and legs flailing, pushing her head up, craning for the surface, her little heart beating wildly. This was life…fighting for life…any living creature knew this primal urge.’

‘Now, as the child’s head reached the air, her mother’s right hand pushed relentlessly on the side of her head and she gulped the hot liquid in once more…her lungs heaving, her air passage blocked, she spluttered and she began to black out as the pressure persisted.’

‘Suddenly, she was scooped up by strong hands under her back and side and she gasped uncontrollably for air. Her mother held her dangling upside-down as the water ran out of her nostrils and mouth and stomach.’

‘She screamed once the oxygen that was her natural right finally returned to her body.’

As I grew, again and again I heard this phrase from my mother’s lips, ‘How could anyone hurt a little baby?’ Over and over. But no, it was never a question.

No. ‘How could anyone hurt a little baby.’ It was a statement. Over and over.

Apropos of nothing and one I lived with most of my growing years. Years later, as an adult, my sister said, ‘Mum’s afraid of you.’ I replied, ‘Well, I’ve always been afraid of her.’

My other bro and father often ribbed my mother with the tale of her having broken bigbro’s arm when he was still crawling, with the copper stick. They delighted in her denials of I did not. He fell out of the peppercorn tree! Although, how he could’ve possibly climbed the tree…he was crawling still? She was not in control during her rages. Weird sense of humour, they had.

Does everyone see their mother as I did as a child?

I saw her as if she was a child. A brilliantly clever, sharp, unhappy one. I’d marvel at how she would plunge her hands into dishwater, from which even the steam was far too hot on my face. Or the kettle boiled and she’d place her hands on it for a long time and not recoil. A bath hot enough to cook lobster in and tea and coffee, scalding hot, to drink.

‘I like it hot,’ she’d tell me pointedly. Later I heard of the firewalkers who’d walk on hot coals, a spiritual practice of mind over body. She was impervious to physical pain, yet her heart was red and bleeding, cut and scorched. Maybe that’s why the material stuff didn’t penetrate. Dad would sit her down when she had panic attacks and then the ritual began – out would come the Fisher’s Phospherine, supposedly a calming potion, to soothe her torment, the pain that stormed inside her little frame. Mum’s mother had at the age of two, stopped visiting her in the orphanage.

Dad often intercepted her coming at me, her face distorted, fingers poised, ready to tear at my flesh. ‘I’ll kill her,’ she would growl.

My will was her bane. ‘You are so