The Dream: The dream begins with a group of people in an old-fashioned apartment building. We exit as a group. As we walk down a hallway I decide to stop by the ladies' room. The door is open, and I wonder if it's actually the ladies—as opposed to the gents. It is, and I go in. Later I'm again looking for the ladies room and realize I'm in the men's section of the building. I see a comfortable-looking men's lounge with stuffed chairs, very clubby looking. The nearby restroom is the men's. I leave the area, feeling socially uncomfortable about my trespass.
Once outside I see a gravel path leading away from the main sidewalk and going into a treed area. I see EH on the path, brushing her teeth. I am also brushing my teeth. I wonder if I should go back to the ladies' room in order to have a place to spit.
Interpretation: This dream seems to be about the unconscious attempting to come to terms with gender. As it begins I'm in a communal setting—with a group of people in an apartment. The apartment is old-fashioned, indicating that the dream is looking back to the time in my youth when gender roles were strictly defined. As I find myself confused about which room is for women and which for men—more than once—I struggle to define where I should be. What sort of behavior is right for me?
I leave this social confusion for the rough (gravel) road of figuring it out for myself. I see an acquaintance along this path, brushing her teeth. According to Tony Crisp, one of the many things teeth can represent in a dream are words—things we've said, things we wish we hadn't said. As I brush my teeth I might be trying to polish or perfect some of these, but I'm left with a dilemma: I find I need to spit. Crisp sees spit as a carrier of strong feelings, such as love or hate. At this point I'm too entrenched in what's considered ladylike to express these feelings, so I have to revisit the “ladies' room” before I can spit it out.
I find this dream very interesting when I imagine it for myself. I have a set of "A-Ha's" of insight around the interpretation from the Daily Dreamer and also a set of my own ideas in projected form. In my imagined version of the dream, and if this were my own dream, I am definitely reviewing the ideas I have about gender and where I belong. Public Restrooms make me think of and feel that distinction, because going into the 'wrong' restroom is a life-long 'faux pas' or nervous fear and it's also 'taboo'. One of the things the dream is sugessting to me, is that I am looking for a way to distinguish my own role, but also, internally, how could I bring the opposites together?
ReplyDeleteI also resonate with the cleaning of my teeth as a metaphor of cleaning up my words/expression, or an imagined need to do so. With 'dream-teeth' I also think ofmetaphors like, "biting off more than I can chew" and the like, which lead me to consider that teeth in dreams also have to do with issues of confidence and nourishment and how I prepare psycho-spiritual truths and meanings for my own digestion of them. I've almost always been shy about spitting, even as a man, and see this as an act of being able to own and release my 'shadow' and also brings to mind other cultural sayings such, "so angry I could spit" or "spitting angry" and I feel that something needs and wants to come out of me. The dream is offering me a view of how I am approaching this question currently, for myself in the collective and shared setting of a gender-specific or separated culture/society... thx for this dream, and the interpretation - they're truly speaking to me on many levels! All Best, TW
Thanks, TW, for these interesting comments that deepen my understanding of the dream.
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