I was a member of the family on the TV show Seventh Heaven. It seemed to take place, in a way, over a period of several years. I was one of the children. I was the one that seemed to be particularly close to the father. It seemed that the mother of this family was in some way abusive of the children. Not physically abusive and not sexually abusive. She neglected them and was abusive in how she punished them. We were in the attic of the home and it was very similar to the attic of my birth home. There was a regular staircase that led to the attic. The whole thing was hardwood floor, not finished. You could walk through the middle but towards the walls you couldn't stand upright as the roof angled down. The attic was used for storage. Myself and two of the younger siblings were up there. I get the feeling that we were up there because we were being punished. We started organizing the stuff up there but I'm not sure why. In one section of the attic there were a bunch of boxes of blankets. There was a pole. The pole held hangers with blankets folded over them. Mother came up into the attic. I don't know if she was particularly angry. We were explaining to her what we were doing. On one end of the attic there were a bunch of very long narrow boxes leaning up against the wall. They were really dirty and had cobwebs on them. I kind of pulled one of them over a little to see what was in them. It was curtain rods. I was going to move them to the other end of the attic. As we had been organizing things we were moving them down to the other end of the attic. Then I started second-guessing the way I was moving everything down to the other end. I wondered if maybe that wasn't the best way to organize things up there. Maybe I should categorize things but not bunch it all together so much. Maybe leave it spread out more. I was going to do something with all of those blankets. The father came up now also. This is the first time that he got a sense that the mother was mistreating the children. I think eventually both parents went back downstairs and left us up there. The parents were hosting a party. The mother was starting to act towards the guest the way she normally does towards her children. She was also treating her children, in front of her guests, the way she normally treats them when there is no one else around. People were becoming very concerned about her treatment of the children. Her behavior became worse and worse. She was eventually committed to a mental rehab facility. The father was extremely distraught over this. Not over the fact, so much, that she had been committed and he was now a single parent, but rather that he had just learned what she had been doing to his children and he was distraught over the treatment of the children as well. It was especially difficult for everyone when she was getting ready to leave. She was walking slowly around the house looking at anything. She was feeling very sad but not necessarily remorseful. I don't think her feelings were associated with the fact that she was being told to leave but just the fact that she was leaving. There were no feelings of remorse. The father was staying away from her purposefully. I can't recall if he even spoke to her or embrace her before she left. It doesn't seem as though he did. Sometime later, she came back for a day visit. He didn't want to see her at all. He was still very distraught over the abuse. I get the sense that he was not going to be able to forgive her for this. Of course, in the TV show he is a minister and is very forgiving. The mother in the waking life show is not at all as she is depicted. Nonetheless, he is still really struggling with this because it is his own children. This next part seems to be a few years later. The children are coming home for a Christmas celebration. A couple of the older children are married and have children of their own now. The youngest child, Ruthie, is a little bit older now. Somewhere Ruthie and Simon were creating a big sign but I can't remember now what it was about. When everyone was there for this celebration. I had said earlier that I felt as though I was the child that was closest to the father. Several times during the dream, when I approached the father to offer comfort, I was the one that was always asking him if he was okay and hugging him often, sitting with him, when I could tell that he was especially distraught. The mother returned and she wanted to return to live there. She was knocking at a double door, trying to get in. I had my body against the area where the two doors meet to try to prevent her from getting in while the others asked the father what to do. He finally said we should let her in. When we opened the door we realized she was moving back in because the double doors led into the garage and we saw the garage piled full of all of her things. She was very frazzled and dirty looking, as were all of her boxes of possessions. As we were moving her in, there were rolls of carpeting. They were small enough that we could just pick them up and throw them over our shoulder to carry them. We realized while we were doing this and talking to her that she had remarried after she left, even though she had never gotten a divorce from my father. She was pregnant with her new husband's child. She was leaving him.