The Sleeping Foreigner

Dreams can serve to nudge us along and attempt to get us back on the right path when we falter. It might seem contradictory, but this dream is issuing a wake-up call.
The Dream: An attractive young woman, someone close to me, is sleeping too much. She resembles the Polish cleaning woman in the PBS mystery Father Brown. I go into her bedroom and try to awaken her with a gentle hug and kiss, as my father would awaken me. She doesn't seem unhappy but doesn't want to get up, either. I'm concerned that all this day-time sleeping might mean she's depressed.

Interpretation: There's a part of myself that feels foreign. There are some family associations here: one of my grandmothers was from Austria Hungary, now in Poland. After her husband died in The Spanish flu epidemic, this brave woman who lived in Brooklyn and spoke little English worked as a cleaning woman to support her three children. She avoided remarriage; having experienced being a step-child in her own youth she didn't want her children to endure the kind of unequal treatment she associated with that situation.

In the dream I experience life from this point of view: as one who is foreign, poorly equipped to cope with the world, and saddled with responsibilities. How did my grandmother respond? She prevailed. How do I respond? I go to sleep. I don't want to engage with a difficult reality. I am comfortable hiding out in bed, happy in my retreat, and wary about confronting my difficulty.

It’s Not Going to Work

A further development on the theme of The High Cost of Femininity

The Dream: I am about to be married and I have just met my intended. He is extremely tall: our size relationship is that of an adult (him) to a 3-year-old (me). I look up at him as I might look up a redwood; his head is so very far away. I want to love him, because we are supposed to be getting married, but I realize I can’t. We kiss, and it has none of the passion of my kiss with the clerk in the previous dream, who is much closer to my size.

I am sitting at a table when I realize this marriage can’t go forward. I have a sinking feeling as I say, “This is like an arranged marriage.” I know it’s said one comes to love one’s spouse in these situations, but I don’t see that happening. He looks kind, and he is clearly ready to love me, but I announce—in spite of the social pressure to conform—that I can’t do it.

Interpretation: Can there be love, freely given, when such a disparity exists between would-be lovers? I reject love under these circumstances. I think Bettleheim would see the dream as a resolution of an oedipal conflict, the re-enactment of a young girl’s realization that her father is not an appropriate love object. On another level of meaning there's Jung's archetype of the father symbolizing the collective conscious, in other words, the values of society. Is some part of me rejecting these? Do I find them inapplicable to my life as a woman? That I look up to him as to a redwood implies some anger: I see red, and he's thick as a post.

Baring the Breast

Have you ever had a dream that seems to resolve a previous dream? Jung tells us that this is to be expected, and that it is part of our natural psychic regulation. This is similar to the way natural physical adjustments take place, for example, sweating to cool the body when you get too warm. In my chat with Jane Teresa Anderson (Episode 44 of The Dream Show) she pointed out that the title of the dream The Bodice Ripper could refer to an opening (exposure) of the heart. I had this dream the night after our chat.

The Dream: I am sitting at a table of arty and intellectual architects. After a while I realize I have no clothes on above the waist. One of the men comes and sits next to me, kissing me on the cheek and saying, “I’ve missed you.” I notice the softness of his youthful face, although his hair is thinning and he must be in his 40s. I say, “I’ve missed you, too.” His name is at the edge of my awareness but I don’t quite get it. We’re happy to be together but can’t think of anything to say.  I notice my bare breasts and think I should cover up, but do nothing about it.

Interpretation: The bodice is off; my heart has opened. The rapprochement is not only with the part of me that can deal with the outer world (my animus) but also with my first image of a man, my father. The exchange about missing each other refers to my grief over his death. That I am sitting with a table of architects tells me that something new is being built.