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.
