I'm Not in the Picture

Sure enough, Janet's last dream was followed by another focused on identity—or, this time, its lack.
The Dream:I'm in an art school. A young man has been selected to do a nude portrait, and I have been selected to be his model. We work in a large urban studio. I am not embarrassed about posing nude; I wear only a pair of 50s style pointed-rim glasses that are very striking in black.

The next morning, before the painter gets to the studio, I decide to check out his progress. He has painted in the cityscape behind me in a purposely crude, modernist style, and one awkward tree is depicted. The colors are strong and unnatural. I am nowhere to be seen.

Janet's Interpretation: Looking at this dream from the point of view of identity helped me to unravel its meaning. My partner convinced me to move from a large urban area to his small hometown in the Mid-West. I hadn't realized what a struggle that would be. I feel friendless and alone; without the anchors of my friends and job I am not sure who I am anymore. The world I was a part of is going on without me, so I guess it's true that I'm not in the picture! I hope that the little bit of greenery that the tree provides is pointing to some new growth that will help me with this transition.


Carla: The black-rimmed glasses might be trying to make a point! Perhaps you are seeing things as darker (bleaker) than they are. New growth is often awkward, but your dream has come to tell you that you can do it.

Old-Time Religion

The Dream: I’m in a city, wandering the streets. I start from a school. There are many churches: each street seems to have one, old, beautiful and out of date. It is nighttime, and I go into one.

Interpretation: Nighttime; the time of dreams and spirit. I leave the learning of the day (school) and enter the spirit realm.

Cheated

The Dream: I want to buy some chickadees, some pretty little birds. A woman sells me five decorated eggs that she says will hatch out into the birds. Later I see her and she tells me that if the birds do hatch I must tell her how I did it and, what’s more, she wants them back. I feel angry, cheated, and annoyed that she is oblivious.

Interpretation: I want something that will fly, but instead am given potential flight. I have to pay for the thing I don’t want: the thing that I now realize has almost no chance of turning into what I do want. But—should the eggs hatch—I must return them. The number five is significant here; it’s when I started school. Does my psyche see this as the start of my confusing the gloss society puts on a thing (the decorated, infertile egg) with the thing itself (flying bird)? Am I only now realizing I’ve been conned?

I Sacrifice My Social Security

The Dream: My daughter has been working as a prostitute in order to pay off her school debt. At first my husband Clark and I don’t react to this; we think she’s a grown woman and can make her own decisions. However, I come to realize, and can see in her countenance, that this “work” is a threat to her very soul since it demands that she cut herself off from her true feelings. I want to help her get out of this situation, so I offer her money. I don’t have much, only my social security check, but I decide, after a little internal struggle, that I don’t need it.

Interpretation: In this dream I begin to realize that I’ve been prostituting my inner vision to satisfy outside demands. I’m paying off a debt (what I owe others) for my education--or what might be more accurately called my socialization. In the course of the dream I become willing to sacrifice approval (social security) to free myself from the necessity to do work I don’t love.

What’s Making My Head Hurt?

The Dream: I am in a large house. I hear my child crying out to me in distress. I don’t want to deal with her problem: I feel tired, but the insistence of her call provokes me to look for her. As I wander the hallways “in search of” I begin to feel distressed and worried, anxious to find her. A little panicky.

I find her in a room full of children, a primary school classroom. My child sits off to the left on a narrow table set at an oblique angle to the rest of the children, who sit quietly facing the front. She looks as I did at age seven, with blonde curly hair. There’s a big bandage across her head. She sees me, but does not acknowledge me. She wants no part of mother. I awaken as from a nightmare.

Interpretation: In the dream I have dark hair: I’ve become my mother. My child, with blonde hair (unlike my waking life daughter), is me. The well-behaved children who sit so quietly are passive receivers of instruction: cowed, proper, all alike, a nice row of good children. Something has whacked my (inner) child on the head, and she’s gained some independence, but at a cost. The adults who surround her are benign; she’s enjoying their attention as well as the empowerment that comes with rejecting her mother, who has arrived too late. Was age seven when I began to go my own way? To realize Mother can’t save me?

Stephen

The Dream: I’m in a school-like setting. I enter a classroom and see Stephen at the front of the room, conferring with 3 or 4 other people. I only glimpse him behind the others. I am dressed fashionably, in a mauve hooded cape over a slim skirt. I am aware of being glamorous. I walk through the room toward a back exit, hoping Stephen will notice me. I’m not sure whether or not he does.

I leave the room, wandering the hallway. Will Stephen follow me? Seek me out? “He was the love of my life,” I think. Then I realize that can’t be right. What about my husband? I think about my attachment to Stephen, feeling it’s ridiculous. In love with a gay man? How utterly futile. What is the attraction? I ask myself. We connected, I decide, on an artistic level.

Interpretation: The outfit I’m wearing in this dream was triggered by my watching children draw Little Red Riding Hood on a TV show. I had been reading about visitation dreams on-line, which no doubt inspired the visit from Stephen, a dear friend who died in 1991. As the dream puts these images together, the cape becomes mauve, the color of mourning, and I learn (I’m in a school setting) how to deal with loss by becoming very practical (the relationship was futile; I have another love) and by connecting the lost person to something that I still have, my interest in art.

Hanging Grandma

When trying to understand one of your dreams it’s a good idea to see if it contains a paradox. In this dream, grandmother is dead and yet she lives. This is the key to the meaning of the dream.

The Dream:  An older woman, “Grandma,” has hung herself. At first I’m afraid to look at her, but for some reason her body is left hanging in a public area, the courtyard of a school, and seeing her is unavoidable. All are in a tizzy over this event. Yet she looks very peaceful; she’s in a yoga position with a contemplative expression on her face. As awful as this incident seems, when I see her serenity I am consoled.

Interpretation: When I had this dream I was preparing to go see and admire the great Florentine painters of the medieval to Renaissance periods. Grandma represents the past; in this case not my personal past but the past artistic glories of European art, which have been an ongoing inspiration in my life. She, like the art I love, hangs in public for all to see. I am distressed that she has died.

Is the dream telling me that these earlier periods of art are now dead for me? Yes: at least as far as being at the core of my artistic inspiration. But the dream is also telling me that a new, revitalized artistic energy will emerge. After all, I take comfort in seeing the spirit live on in the dead Grandma (her yoga position and contemplative expression) despite her apparent death. The paradox this dream explores is the common dream topic of new life (energy) emerging from death (stasis).

The Price is Too High

You might think an old conflict has been put behind you; sometimes a dream reveals it hasn’t.

The Dream: I have just met a woman who went to Brown. I am impressed with the school’s prestige and reputation. The woman is now a man. I am trying to remember where I went to school, hoping it was also an impressive place. I would like to impress the fellow, who is slightly hefty or rotund  even though he looks nerdy, puffed up with his own importance.

Interpretation: The problem in a nutshell: as a woman it is difficult to get on in the world; yet the male role, which enables success, is woefully unattractive.