On Edge

The Dream: I am attempting to attach a long strand of crotcheted or knitted edging to a piece of fabric. I can't make it lay flat, and its width doesn't look consistent.

Interpretation: I am on edge. I can't integrate something into the fabric of my life. There's some sort of inconsistency that's bothering me: something isn't behaving properly.

Intertwined Lives

The Dream: A long line of Hasidic Jews snakes through scenic venues such as the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Interpretation: As a child I first noticed Hasidic Jews on a trip to my parents' hometown, so my personal associations for them are childhood and Brooklyn. They looked strange to a six-year-old, so in the dream they represent something alien, the “other.” Am I confronting my own alienation, or sense of being the “other,” in this dream?

Wikipedia describes Hasidic Jews as “a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality through the popularization and internalization of Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspect of the faith.” The dream is pointing out that I feel alienated from my own mystical, or spiritual, side. The fact that the dream has brought the group to my current Bay Area environment suggests I'm revisiting old ideas about my self, my otherness, and beginning to integrate them into the present.

The Green Bug

The Dream: I'm chasing a green bug in the bathroom. It looks more like a flat, round green flower than like a bug—but it's mobile and runs from me. I try to catch it to take it outside as it scurries around the base of the toilet. As it evades my attempt yet again I lose patience and decide to squash it. Then I take pity on it, seeing it wants to live, and I let it go.

Interpretation: Something is bugging me, something that I'd like to get out of my system (it's near the toilet). I want to be rid of it, to let it go, but it evades me. My solution is to put it outside (air my feelings), but, by refusing to be caught, my difficulty refuses to be handled in this way. I lose patience and decide to suppress it (I want to kill the bug). I relent, however, when I become aware that it is a carrier of the life force (it wants to live): The color green is indicative of new life, and, besides, there's something playful about the way this creature teases me. I think it's probably a good thing that I let it live, and I hope it lets me take it outside, into the open, soon. 

A Broken Engagement

The Dream: I am engaged to the fiancé of a gay friend. He and I are dancing together in preparation for our wedding. He is very small, but very self-confident, and to me this comes across as his being full of himself. He does one surprising dance move, a head to toe shimmy. I'm impressed, but—try as I might—I can't get him to catch on to the grapevine.

I become aware that I have no feeling for him. This makes me a little sad. At one point I hold him as if he were a child, across my lap. I don't know why we're engaged. I say to him, “Don't you think we should get to know one another better?” He is hurt, I can see that in his eyes, but as far as I'm concerned we've only met 3 times. He says, “You know it's right when it's right.”

It doesn't feel right to me, and I want to break it off. At first I don't think I can because people have been invited, all sorts of arrangements have been made. How many people go through with a marriage, I wonder, only because they don't know how to get out of it? Then I remember that it's the planning for my daughter's marriage that has been finalized, not mine. I call it off.

Interpretation: What is the engagement I've broken? Clearly it's to something I find inappropriate, to another's fiancé, and a gay man at that. This dream character represents a small part of myself that excels in spontaneity (the shimmy) and refuses to be trained (I can't teach him the grapevine). The dream points out that I've broken off my engagement to the emotional, intuitive side of myself, that part that knows without analysis when something is right. It's the egotistical small child side, the 3 year old who is full of himself.

I come to realize through the dream that I don't feel I know this part: despite the fact that we're engaged I don't think we know each other. He embarrasses me, and I want to be free of him. The dream points out my discomfort, giving me the first step in possibly reintegrating this alien aspect.