In the dark I struggled to free myself. I kept crying out – screaming – "No… no…please…don't do this to me…let me go…please."
Strong hands held me and my struggles were useless against them. I could not see their faces in the dark, and their voices were indistinguishable murmurs. I only felt hands forcing my arms above my head and holding my ankles.
I had managed to lock my legs together, but it was futile. Whoever my assailants were, they made no effort to stifle my screams, and so I gave out with a piercing shriek as I felt my legs forced apart to expose my sex organ.
A body came over me and a hard pulsating penis probed for the entrance to my vagina. "Please…don't please…"
I woke with a start, sweating, gasping and shaking all over. My fingers were pressing against my vagina. Every night now I had my nightmare of being raped by unidentifiable men…held by unseen hands, always to wake up as a penis was about to be thrust into me, and always it was my own fingers that were being inserted.
It had not been like that at first, not for some time after Clive, my husband, had been killed in a motor car accident, Clive, my friend, companion, lover and other half.
At first it was Clive who came to me in the night. He would come to me in and, like the rapists, just as he was about to enter me, I would awake, not screaming and pleading for it to stop, but weeping, begging Clive not to leave me.
At other times I would dream I heard him knocking at the front door, and it was such a vivid dream I woke up and went racing to the door calling out, "Wait, Clive, wait my love, I'm coming darling." Of course, when I opened the door, there was no one there.
In time he came into my dreams no more, and for a while I slept in peace. Then began the awful dream of being raped. At first it was not every night. It would happen once or twice a week, but over a period of about three months it took place more and more until it became almost a nightly ritual.
At first Edmund my son responded to my cries and screams, coming into my bedroom to wake me up and asking what was the matter and was I all right.
Dear loving Edmund, the pride and joy of Clive and me. We had always seen him as a wonderful gift for our marriage, the fruit of our love. Even in those difficult teenage years he had never, as some teenagers do, sought to reject us. Perhaps that was because we somehow got it right in relation to gradually letting him go – letting him take more and more responsibility for his own life.
Of course, Edmund had enjoyed the favours of some of the girls at high school. The girls had been the sort who prefer the gentler male rather than the noisy macho types. Clive and I did get worried at one point when we learned that Edmund was enjoying the favours of a widow more than twice his age. After some consideration however, we agreed that the relationship, if it did not get too involved, would probably be good for Edmund.
As Clive commented, "She seems a decent sort of woman, and will probably teach him how to please his partner or wife later on."
Before Clive and I met I suspected there had been an older woman in his life. I never asked and he never told me, but even if he had, I would not have had grounds for getting on my high horse, as I had been initiated by a man much older than I. As a result, Clive and I had been able to please each other almost from our first night together.
I had told Edmund when he came to investigate my screams that I was just having a bad dream, without telling him what the dream was. I told him not to worry and to go back to sleep, as he had to get up early in the morning to get to work. He looked doubtful but I urged him, "Back to bed, darling."
After that he did not come to wake me again, but he did raise the matter with me as the nightmare began to arrive night after night. "Shouldn't you see the doctor or somebody?" he asked.
I at first declined the suggestion. I had more than an inkling of what the problem was. At forty I was still a very sexually potent woman. Clive and I had engaged in our love making at least four or five time a week. Once the sharp edge of my grief had been blunted, the craving for sexual gratification had returned.
I masturbated frequently, but this only seemed to stave off my sexual hunger for a very short time. I needed what I thought of as "the real thing." I wanted a man touching my body and declaring his love as Clive did. I wanted to take a man's penis into my hand and suck on his crown until he came, or feel him inside me as he spurted his seed into me as Clive did with such carefree abandon. In short, I wanted love and the things that went with love between a fertile woman and virile man.
I had hoped that the nightmare would go away, but it didn't, and I came to dread going to bed at night and the coming of sleep, knowing that my rape dream would hold me in its grip once more.
Finally I gave in and went to see my doctor. I told him the truth and he listened sympathetically, then with some humming and hurrumping he said, "I think, Zintra, you're right in your diagnoses of the cause. You are the sort of woman who needs a man, and knowing you and Clive as I have done over the years, it isn't just any man you want."
"No," I replied, "With Clive it was all the other things that went with sex, the love and companionship."
"There's not a great deal I can do to help you, Zintra, unless of course you want to go to a psychiatrist, but it's not as if your response to the situation is an abnormal one. I think perhaps we can try a mild sedative and see how that goes.
In the following days the "mild sedative" proved to be a bit less mild and bit more powerful, than I had expected. It left me drowsy and feeling vaguely unwell during the day, and sent me off to sleep quickly at night but it didn't stop the nightmare coming.
After giving the medication what I thought was a fair trial, I stopped taking it. The rape dream was beginning to really undermine me by then. I thought it might not be so frightening if I could somehow enjoy the dream, allow myself to submit as I believe some women do when subjected to a real rape attack.
Even this was no help. The dream simply would not allow me to feel anything but terror as I was held down and the crown of a penis pushed against my vagina. In any case, if it is possible that a woman can enjoy rape, which I doubt, the penis of the faceless assailant never actually penetrated my vagina. I always woke up at the time when, in normal sexual intercourse, one would expect to feel the length slide into the female tunnel.
Edmund still heard my cries and pleadings, and started to comment on how pale I was looking. He also noted that I was not eating properly and now seemed always to have a pain.
He was right about the pain. It was a dull ache in my lower abdomen – an ache that masturbation might disperse temporarily, but even this became ever more ineffective.
The ache was physical, but it was also emotional. I have said that I was still an extremely fertile woman, and one of the regrets that Clive and I had, was that we had only had one child. For some years we went for all sorts of tests, and finally it was pronounced that there was no reason why I should not get pregnant, but that there was something amiss with Clive's sperm.
After that, we accepted the situation, and focused our love on each other and Edmund.
Now, after my recovery from Clive's death, I think the ache I felt was not simply the result of sexual deprivation; it was also a sense of loss for the other child or children I had never had. Ridiculously for a forty year old woman, I wanted to be pregnant.
I was fully aware that I was still capable of bearing a child, at least as far as my fertility was concerned, but I had doubts about the advisability of pregnancy at my age. I had heard it said that a woman should not get pregnant after she was around thirty five or six.
On a visit to my doctor I casually asked him about this, and he laughed and said, "I suppose that they are right up to a point, Zintra, but I have known women in their forties to get pregnant, and thoroughly enjoy it." Then laughing again he said, "I read recently of a woman of sixty two giving birth, but I wouldn't advise it. Why do you ask, do you think you're pregnant?"
"No," I replied a little unhappily, "I just wish I was sometimes."
