The Dream About My Mother I Didn’t Dare Tell

Adrián woke with a jolt in the middle of the night, his heart battering his ribs and his cock so hard it hurt. The room was freezing, the thermometer on the bedside table showing barely seven degrees, and yet he was sweating as if he’d run for miles. He sat up slowly, perched on the edge of the mattress, and brought both hands to his head, rubbing his temples as if that could erase what had just gone through his mind.

It wasn’t the first time a dream had woken him like that. Well into adulthood, he had learned to live with his wet dreams, even to enjoy them. Some he had told laughing in bed, with a partner; others he had kept for his nights alone, stroking himself slowly while he let the images run free behind his eyelids. They had never seemed like a problem. They were his, they were harmless, they were part of the game.

But this one was different. This one left him with a strange knot in his stomach, a mix of arousal and guilt he didn’t know where to put.

It was about her. My mother.

He stared into the dark, trying to convince himself his brain had invented it at random, that it meant nothing. And yet, against his will, he went over the whole scene again, frame by frame, like someone pressing on a wound to see whether it still hurts.

In the dream, she was wearing loose shorts, the kind for lounging around the house, and nothing underneath. She was standing there, distracted, and when she noticed him watching from the doorway she didn’t flinch or cover herself. On the contrary. With two fingers she pulled the fabric aside, just a little, just enough for him to see. Her clit was swollen, shining, offered up without a single word.

Adrián, in the dream, didn’t resist. He crossed the room, knelt in front of her, and buried his mouth between her legs. He heard her breathing harder, felt her gripping the edge of the piece of furniture, felt her knees trembling until her whole body was shaking in a long orgasm. And right then, like a cable being cut, he woke up.

***

He switched on the lamp. The yellow light gave him back the same old room: clothes hanging over the chair, the half-full glass of water, ordinary reality. None of it calmed him. He was still hard, still with the image stuck behind his eyes, and no matter how often he told himself it was absurd, his body did not agree with his conscience.

He decided to do what he always did whenever something got into his head: look for the source. Something had to have triggered that dream. You don’t fantasize out of nowhere about someone so forbidden unless there’s a crack, a buried memory the subconscious dug up precisely that night.

He closed his eyes and dug. He stayed like that a long while, discarding stray images, until suddenly one appeared with such clarity it left him breathless.

That afternoon. The movie.

He must have been fifteen or sixteen. An ordinary afternoon, the two of them watching TV in the living room. She was sitting on the big sofa and he was on the floor, leaning against the base of the furniture, close enough to notice every movement she made, but at an angle where—he had assumed then and now confirmed—she couldn’t really see what he was doing. She probably thought he was asleep or absorbed in the screen.

The movie was long and boring. The two of them in silence, each in their own world. And at some point, when he turned his head purely by reflex to look at her, he saw it. Her hand was inside her shorts, over her underwear, rubbing herself with a barely perceptible slowness. At first he thought he’d misread it, that he was imagining things. He looked again. And again. There was no mistake.

He could have coughed. He could have made any noise to let her know he was awake, that he was watching, that it should stop. He didn’t. He chose to stay still, holding even his breath, while he watched her from the corner of his eye. Her face had changed: lips parted, eyelids heavy, a concentration that had nothing to do with the movie. Her fingers kept moving under the fabric of her shorts, slowly, and Adrián watched them as if hypnotized, feeling his own body respond without permission.

His cock had gotten rock hard inside his pants. The filthy thrill of seeing what he shouldn’t, of being the invisible witness to something absolutely intimate, turned him on far more than any magazine hidden under the mattress. He waited. He watched her tense, hold back a sigh, go very still for a few seconds. Then, with utter calm, she settled herself back on the sofa, took her hand out, wiped her fingers on the blanket over her legs, and sat up straight again, placid, as if nothing had happened.

Neither of them said a word. He had completely lost the thread of the movie, and he doubted she had followed it either. He didn’t ask her anything, either. That afternoon was sealed away in a silence that lasted for years, until this early morning when his mind decided, on its own, to go looking for it.

***

Adrián opened his eyes. There it was, then. The trigger. Not so mysterious after all. His head had taken an old memory, charged with that forbidden filth he had never dared name, and turned it into a dream where the boundary was finally crossed.

Because if he was honest with himself, that hadn’t been the only time his desire had fed on secret watching. From a very young age, he had been an observer. In the yard of the house where he grew up there was an old wall that looked out onto the neighbors’ back garden. With the patience of an ant, he had made a tiny hole, hidden among the cracks, and from there he would spy on the girls next door when they bathed. He remembered his heart racing, the fear of being caught, the electric pleasure of seeing what he was supposed not to see.

And there were swimming lessons. While the other boys struggled to stay afloat and understand the instructions, he would submerge himself and look up. Every so often the instructor would adjust her swimsuit with a quick gesture, and every now and then, underwater, he could make out a tuft of pubic hair peeking from the edge of the fabric. Those stolen seconds lasted him all week. He learned to swim late and badly, but he learned something else long before the rest.

All his life, he realized now, he had been a silent collector. He gathered images, gestures, other people’s carelessness, and stored them in some corner of memory that his lonely nights later tugged at. The subconscious doesn’t invent: it recycles. It rearranges what you feed it. And for decades he had fed it an entire archive of furtive glances.

What threw him wasn’t the mechanism, which he understood perfectly well. It was the material chosen that night. Out of his whole collection, the dream had gone and pulled out the most uncomfortable piece, the one he kept under double lock, and put it in the spotlight without asking permission.

***

He sat there a long while, lamp still on, his breathing calmer now. He thought about getting up, drinking some water, distracting himself with anything until the image blurred and he could go back to sleep as if nothing had happened.

But he didn’t. His body was still firm, insistent, and guilt, far from extinguishing desire, seemed to fuel it. There was something about the forbidden that pulled at him the way it always had: the hole in the wall, the pool water, the sofa that afternoon. His entire erotic life had orbited around that which he shouldn’t look at and looked at anyway.

He turned off the light. He lay back under the blankets in the freezing room and let the two scenes merge: the real one, the sofa and the fingers moving under the shorts, and the invented one, the dream the cold of dawn had interrupted. He stroked himself slowly, unhurried, fully aware of what he was doing and choosing not to stop.

He wasn’t going to tell anyone. This wasn’t an anecdote to share laughing in bed. It was his and no one else’s, one of those truths you keep in the darkest place and only return to in the dark. He let desire carry him, the image of her offering herself at the threshold burned into him, and surrendered to it without any more judgment, until heat finally beat the cold and his body went slack against the damp sheets.

When he opened his eyes again, a bit of gray light was slipping through the blinds. The dream had faded away, as all dreams do, but the memory of the sofa was still intact, vivid, patiently waiting for the next dawn when his mind decided to go looking for it again.