Three Faces of Eve

The Dream: Yoko Ono, it turns out, is responsible for starting the civil rights movement in America. She is on a visit, walking down a flight of stairs, the crowd pressing in from all sides—photographers, newsmen, and so on. Despite all the attention she realizes that no one takes her seriously because she is Japanese. So she starts the movement to change this.

Interpretation:Two streams of thought in waking life came together in this dream. The first was influenced by a book, Margaret Atwood's “The Flood.” The women in the book cope with the world in different ways. The three lead characters, Toby, Ren and Amanda, are typically underestimated. Each has a different strategy for survival, and each demonstrates a kind of archetypal woman. Toby is the sexless, healing, capable mother. Ren, a dancer and sex worker, kind and uncalculating, is sweet and easily led but loyal and fearless when necessary. Amanda is tough, worldly, and all calculation. These women are more capable than anyone realizes, and they survive by helping each other.

The second stream of influence was a philosophy lecture series on “The Meaning of Life.” The lectures presented many points of view; the one on Gandhi emphasized his insistence that we must act to right wrongs, as Yoko does in the dream. Yet her high-minded response to her personal dilemma is overlaid with a kind of typically female pique: No one is taking me seriously! As the feminists used to say, “The personal is political.”