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.

Am I Dark?

The Dream: A woman, a teacher, lives nearby. She has an Irish/German/American face, but dark coloring. She is looking into her family history and says that her ancestors come from Nom, a country she has been unable to locate on a map.

I go home and look at a map and, to my surprise and delight, very quickly discover that the province of Nom is inside Egypt. I go to her place and bang excitedly on the door. (Her house is a white stationary trailer.) She answers, and I enter the narrow building. “I've found Nom,” I say. “It's in Egypt.”

I either think or say, “That explains why you are so dark.”

Interpretation: This woman has something to teach me. Nom in French means name. This--plus the woman's mixed ancestry, her family history research, and her inability to locate her family's geographical origin--tells me that this dream is dealing with where I fit into the human family. Where do I come from? And beyond that, what does it mean to be human?

The dream tells me that the “dark” aspects I carry within (and that are clearly visible to all) are ancient (like Egypt) and very rich (like the Pharaohs). If I disavow these parts of myself I'm left with a life that is white and narrow, like the woman's trailer home. This is another way of saying that my self-understanding doesn't own up to the complexity of the human psyche and experience. At the same time, while accepting my atavistic human traits is an important step in developing the sort of human being that doesn't wallow in self-righteousness, it's not an excuse or justification for bad behavior.

There's a Sock on Your Hat!

The Dream: I'm visiting one of my brothers, about to leave. I need to get to Heathrow Airport for my journey home. I go to a travel kiosk that looks like an old-fashioned counter at a train station: the clerks are behind a grill. I ask for directions to Heathrow. When I approach the counter the woman is very friendly and congenial, and says to me, “Did you know there's a sock on your hat?” It's placed the way a decorative flower might have been. We both roar with laughter, and I say:”My brother could have told me!” I feel he's played a brotherly prank on me, and I have to admit it's pretty funny.

Interpretation: Not all dreams deal with heavy issues; most, in fact, reflect day to day concerns. After my recent trip to a foreign country to visit one of my husband's childhood friends, I had two dreams featuring laughter. My relative (in waking life my husband, not my brother) played a prank on me by subjecting me to his very self-involved friend for a few days. (I was “grilled” by the ordeal.) In the dream I laugh it off. This releases tension and points out that I shouldn't take the situation, or myself, too seriously.

The Rape

The Dream: A woman is friends with a man. We are living in a shared space. I leave them to go into another room. Soon I hear the woman screaming for me, horribly distressed. I find her in the bathroom. The toilet seat is up and she has immersed her bottom in the water, which is tinged with blood. It's clear to me that she has been raped by her “loving” friend. Shall I call 911?” I say. She doesn't answer. “I'll call 911,” I say, leaving her to look for a phone. This nightmare awakens me.

Interpretation: At the time of this dream I belonged to a book club sponsored by a Christian church. The meeting devolved into a discussion of the participants' personal beliefs. As I listened to others talk about “faith” and “belief” and “Christianity” I realized how alien I find these ideas. While the dream was triggered by media stories about rape, and certainly reflects the vulnerability that women face, the underlying issue for me is the rape of the intellect that I feel as a participant in a Christian group. I feel I'm not allowed to express my honest thoughts. This leaves me feeling my intellect (logical mind) has been raped; who I am (my self) denied.

All In It Together

The Dream: A woman has been tasked with beating a man who lies face down, prone. He is covered with a blanket, and she must beat him with a whip until his blood runs black. She is appalled at this thing she is doing, but does it anyway. The power that set her to her dismal task is Christian.

I am an onlooker, also horrified. At some point his blood does run black, and she begins to rail against Christianity for having one set of rules for its followers while the hierarchy behaves quite differently. She is very angry, but never questions her own acquiescence, in other words, why she did as she was told rather than follow her conscience.

Interpretation: First I'll look at some things that triggered this dream: At the time of the dream I was reading Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight, and was at the place where Freud analyzes one of his own dreams and feels it has pointed out that he has suppressed his own guilt, just as my dream beater does. This was around the time of the horrific terrorist shooting at a mall in Kenya, following close on the heels of a shooting by a mentally ill person of people at an American Navy installation.

I feel guilty when I hear about these, and other, world situations, as well as disappointment and anger that the country I was brought up to believe had some sort of moral superiority now appears as venal and self-serving as the rest of the world. In the dream, Christianity stands for bankrupt values and hypocrisy on a national scale, and I ponder my own guilt as a citizen, even though I, like the dream actor, go along with it and feel powerless to stop it. I feel forced, as she does, to participate in things I find morally reprehensible. The dream implies my guilt and asks me why I don't  stop.

A Portrait

The Dream: A woman and I are sitting at a table, across from each other. We're each drawing portraits, straight-on heads. I am the teacher. She's very skillful; my criticism of her work is that it lacks feeling. I take her drawing and, with her permission, make corrections. I change the mouth, making it a vibrant pink and somewhat pouty, or sensual. My other criticism is that the portrait is vague: it's very soft and lacks definition, with one color bleeding into the next.

Interpretation: The Unconscious gives me a drawing lesson! The artist I'm instructing in this dream reminds me of an egg tempera painter who wanted to meet me; she came to my house as an acolyte. When she showed me her paintings it was clear that she was highly skilled—more so than I—in handling the medium. Yet she was not satisfied with her work because, she said, it lacked imagination. This was true. As with many painters, her skill exceeded her conception. Yet she loved painting, and enjoyed her chosen subject matter. Of course I complimented her skill. I said that it only made sense for her to do what resonated with her. I suggested keeping a dream journal if she wanted to develop some original ideas.

In the dream I admire the artist's skill but feel she needs more expression, as symbolized by my “fixing” the mouth, the organ of speech. So the message for me is, of course to express myself.

When I tried drawing the face this artist drew in the dream I learned something about how to use color pencils—that is, very softly and delicately, building up color with gentle iterations. I tend to jump to the finish immediately, and that can make me heavy-handed, a hard thing to recover from! So the dream taught me this about self-expression: take it easy; let it develop; don't jump in with too much clarity and definition. The things I criticize in the dream artist are exactly what I need to do.

A Woman in Black and White Polka Dots

The Dream Image: A woman in a white dress with large black polka dots. Her hair is black, brushed back in a style reminiscent of the 50s.

Interpretation: In 1950s American things were apparently (if not actually) simpler. Both television screens and world issues were seen in black and white; there were no shades of gray. This dream was triggered by a drawing I made in honor of a very elderly family relative, a figure from my childhood.

Not an I (Eye) Surgeon

The Dream: There is an eye surgery nearby. The head doctor, who does laser surgery, is an affable phony. He's been friendly, so I go back to see him. He's in the middle of an operation. To get to him I have to walk all the way to the end of his facility, a long, narrow room. I see him working next to a large rectangular surgical table covered by a tray filled with blood. The smell puts me off, plus I can see he's busy, so I leave.

As I get to the front door one of his assistants, an officious nurse, points to a flimsy sign, folded over in a way that makes it unreadable, handwritten on lined school paper. The sign says, “Stay Out!” or “No Admittance.” She is judgmental in that quiet, huffy, offended way that some women have perfected. She says something like, “Didn't you see the sign?” as she slams and locks the door after me.

I feel guilty and ill at ease about having trespassed, even though I hadn't seen the sign. I worry that I will be the cause, or be blamed, if there's a difficulty with the eye operation.

Interpretation: This dream was triggered by a guest dreamer post:  The Dream. I saw the dream as sexual, in some way connected to the dreamer's menses, related either to her actual father's reaction to her coming to womanhood or to the father as symbolic of the culture's values. I was concerned that the woman who offered the dream might be offended by my interpretation. My own dream tells me that I shouldn't go near the blood, that I am trespassing. Perhaps with this particular dream, I was “at the end of [my] facility;” in other words, either my comments were facile or I was out of my depth. And this could be true because, to avoid upsetting the dreamer, I did feel the need to soften my reaction to her dream. I see the doctor in my dream as a phony, but affable.

If I make a mistake with someone's “I” (eye) I leave myself open to a huffy, offended judgment. At least as far as that particular guest dream goes, my own psyche thinks it might have been better to see the writing on the wall (the sign) and “Stay out!”

A Friendly Oppressor

The Dream: I'm at a large dinner party. My older brother is sitting at the table, about three-quarters of the way down from me. I'm near, or at, one of the heads. I am crying because my other brother has died. A young woman, a friend, sits on my lap. At first I think this is a joke, but after a while I realize there are no other seats and she means to stay. This begins to feel oppressive.

Interpretation: I don't have the inner resources to take care of a need (there are not enough seats for all at the table). I only have my head (logic). Yet feeling cannot be denied, and I am crying. My brother's death, and the realization that I am three-quarters through my own life, is the oppressive thing that sits on me and won't go away. It's no joke. Yet my oppressor is friendly, why is that? Because she is there to teach me an important lesson, to make me aware that death is a reality I shouldn't run from, but must accept.

In the Toilet

Sometimes we need to cooperate with parts of ourselves we don't particularly enjoy.
The Dream: A young woman, unmarried and pregnant, is receiving help from a nun. The young woman wonders what sort of obligation this might entail; she doesn't agree with the nun's religion or values. At the same time she is grateful for the aid and feels that she will, in the future, repay the organization that helped her.

The nun and the young woman are in a small, closet-like area with nothing but a toilet. The young woman decides to sit down and, to her surprise, ends up in the toilet. The nun lectures her about making this stupid move. It's somewhat difficult, but the two of them working together manage to get the young woman out of the toilet.

Interpretation: I'm feeling closed in and restricted (in the small closet-like area). I need a kind of help that is difficult for me to accept because I don't agree with its black and white (nun's colors) unnuanced point of view. Nevertheless, without some organization, however confining it may feel, I'm going to be in the toilet (not doing well at all) and my new baby (project) will not survive. The dream tells me I need to respect and support my helpers, those annoyingly demanding parts of myself, if I'm going to produce anything of value.

Betrayal

The Dream: My husband Clark is sitting on a cushy chair with a woman on his lap. They are clearly lovers. Clark doesn't mind that I see this, and indeed feels I should accept the situation. I think I would like to try to see, objectively, what this woman is like; so I observe. She seems young and light hearted. At one point a little boy, about 4, appears. He has blond curly hair and looks angelic. He is asleep, inert, lying on the floor to the left of the seated couple. She goes over to him and attends to him in a sweet, maternal way. I like this woman, but I don't like the situation.

I begin to inwardly steam over what I see as Clark's betrayal. When did he have time time to get involved with another woman?! We're almost always together. I think that I'll tell him he has to choose; he can't have us both as he seems to believe. But then I realize that even if he relinquishes this particular woman my trust in him has been destroyed, and things will never be the same again. I awaken, upset as from a nightmare, and very relieved it was a dream.

Interpretation: This dream was triggered by the news that a friend's husband is involved with someone else. The dream touches on my own residual oedipal conflict, the clue being that the other woman is a sweet maternal person whom I like, but it deals with something else as well. I had been reading about Jung's personal life and was disappointed to discover that he apparently felt that the women in his life should tolerate the same arrangement the dream portrays. This expectation strikes me as self-serving, cruel, insensitive and exploitative; it makes me angry on behalf of both Mrs. Jung and Toni Wolff. At a personal level I have to reconcile the fact that someone whose intellect and insight I so thoroughly admire, a person to whom my conception of the mind is “married,” can behave in a way I find thoroughly callous.

Somehow these people worked it out: perhaps the women felt that the man's greatness created an entitlement. Living in an era that offered no autonomy to women, they were victims of their historical moment and needed Jung in order to fulfill their own potential: reflected greatness (the golden haired boy) might have struck them as better than no greatness at all.

Guest Dreamer: Trying to Turn a Corner

Today's guest dreamer, Wild Rice, is having some trouble turning a corner. I'll interpret her dream as if it were my own. Only she knows the personal associations that play a part in her dream, but I hope to give her some ideas about its universal symbols.

The Dream: I was with an older man. He had caramel colored hair. The hair reminds me a little of the sleazy attorney from the TV series “Breaking Bad.” This man wanted me to hypnotize him (I am a Hypnotherapist IRL.)

He had status in the community. He was a high ranking business man. He had a lot of interest in receiving my help. He took my hand in his. Part of the time, he held his arm out, in a chivalrous fashion, for me to take, I took it.

We kept walking along, as we moved from the indoors, down an easy set of wide stairs, and were then suddenly outside. I was very worried what others would think, as this felt very improper to be with him this way. It was a feeling of an illicit affair, or something very wrong.

We had a destination in mind. We were headed toward a place where I could perform the hypnosis for him. I saw others around us, making a similar journey, walking near us. He also had a woman on his left arm. I was on his right. We were moving around a curve then, in this roadway, which had only foot traffic. It was almost like a wide track. It was as if my body were a vehicle that I had to steer. It was difficult to move my body around this curve. I could feel a lot of force pressing against me as I attempted to steer myself to move with him smoothly. It took every ounce of my strength, almost super human strength. I really had to focus. He seemed to do this easily.

*I have had a similar dream on many occasions, where I am on a road, and instead of a car, I only have my body, maybe it’s got a set of wheels on a bare frame under it. I have to move it with my body. It feels so difficult to make the journey home, or to my place of residence. I keep trying to get there, despite the difficult circumstances. Sometimes I have a bike, but no proper car. I am usually on a highway, and the last time I dreamed this, I was at a shady place of town, under the bridge, near the freeway exit. There is usually hardly any traffic in these dreams.

Carla's commentary: An older man who lives in my psyche both attracts and repels me. Who he might be based on in waking life only Wild Rice can say. His caramel hair suggests something appealing--warmth and sweetness--but at the same time alludes to something unsavory (the sleazy attorney). As the dream ego I want to forget about him: his request that I hypnotize him is my own desire to move him into my unconscious (put him to sleep). It's difficult for me to do this for several reasons. For one thing, he is important to me (he has status in the community). Perhaps he is associated with the part of me that is successful in the world (he is a high-ranking businessman) or maybe I am intimidated by his status. And there's another aspect to “businessman:” what do they wear? Suits. Is he my suitor? That he needs my help, takes my hand, and offers his arm tells me that what he represents is a part of me, or of my life, that I need to integrate rather than push away from my conscious awareness. When I take the arm he offers I am taking the first step.

Once I've taken the step toward acknowledging this uncomfortable part of my inner life and I walk outside, into the “open” with it, I have immediate misgivings. It feels wrong and improper. My feelings about the impropriety are centered on what others will think more than on what I think, yet they might be telling me that there's something I need to look at that is socially or culturally unacceptable.

We are headed for a destination, but at this point in the dream I've circled back to my original goal of “hypnotizing,” or “putting to sleep” this uncomfortable psychic element. Suddenly another woman is with us. In my dream, this 2nd woman is my mother, and the thing I want to put to sleep is my oedipal desire to monopolize my father. My body has become mechanical—a vehicle I must steer (control) in spite of the fact that I find it very difficult. I've lost touch with my body in order to deaden feelings I find inappropriate. This conundrum has thrown me a curve (the curved track), and I'm having a difficult time negotiating my path. I need to resolve this particular issue so that I can find my way home, that is, to the place where my authentic self can reside comfortably.

Transfiguration

In this dream the goddess, mourned in the last dream, has re-emerged.
The Dream: A woman in archaic costume is transfigured into a goddess. I see this happen, and I see the changes that take place on her face. For a moment I see reflected in her face a naked power. She composes herself and holds herself erect and majestic. Others doubt, and will doubt, her godhood. She, however, is completely assured.

Interpretation: It's the time of year that I expect a god to be born, and this dream reflects that expectation. The dream tells me I don't have to accept a fixed idea about who or what a god may be; gods will appear in ways that astonish.

Out the Window

The Dream: A glamorous if superficial-looking woman has something I don't have, and I'm not happy about it. By way of explanation Clark says, “She's attractive.” I am immediately hit by the implication “And I'm not?” I'm very angry at my husband for 1) thinking this blond woman is so attractive and 2) not getting that he has insulted me.

There is an unusually tall bed near a window. As Clark climbs up a short ladder to reach the bed I goose him. He loses his footing, shoots up into the air and goes out the second story window. I am shocked, thinking he'll be killed. When I look out the window I see he's managed to grasp onto a nearby steel grid. The seat of a bicycle is not far from his foot, and it looks as if he'll be able to use it to push himself to safety. When I see he's safe the situation strikes me as humorous, and I laugh.

Interpretation: As the scene opens I'm irritated at my other half (my Animus), the carrier of my own internalized patriarchal values. When he goes out the window, however, the situation becomes alarming. The bike seat, similar in shape to the phallus, becomes the “vehicle” that reintegrates this part of my psyche. The trickster, prompting the humorous goose, has intervened to show me that I don't want to get rid of the masculine altogether (as in kill), but I do want to enjoy the temporary ascendancy that comes from being able to laugh at him, in other words, not take him too seriously.

Fretwork Woman

The Dream: My artist friend P wants to get together but I keep putting her off. After a while I can tell she doesn't believe my excuses, and it's true they are a lack of enthusiasm rather than anything concrete. I just don't feel like getting together. I see an image of a very tall female figure made of interconnected open shapes, a figure made of fretwork.

Interpretation: My friend P represents my inner artist. She is upset and hurt that I don't want to engage with her. I'm feeling too low for creative play. The dream tells me to stop fretting before that's all that's left of me.

The Present Presents Problems

The Dream: I'm with a group of people in a foreign country. Someone is giving away her things. A large group of old glass items comes up; they are dusty and wrapped in tissue. The disburser looks in my direction as she describes the lot, and I wonder if these objects are for me. How should I respond? Should I gush a bit, so she will know I'm grateful? I like these pieces; they are lovely and might be antiques, but at the same time they present some problems: I have no place to put them; the items are too much for me to carry; they would be expensive to ship, and they are fragile and could break. To top it off, I'm not sure if they are meant for me, and I know I'll feel like a fool if I act as though they are being given to me and then realize they aren't. As it turns out, the disburser has been looking in my direction because the objects are being given to the woman sitting behind me.

Interpretation: I'm in new territory (a foreign country) with the dilemma my dream presents (that potential gift). It must be something that's currently happening (the present), yet it hearkens back to something old (antique) and obscure (it's dusty, wrapped in tissue). As my unconscious attempts to unload these things she no longer wants, I struggle to come to terms with them. (How should I respond?) Once I've gone over all the reasons why I can't deal with this “gift” I side step the problem by denying it altogether. It really wasn't meant for me.

Guest Dreamer: Coming Up

In Elizabeth's dream a lot has come up; let's take a look at it.

The Dream: I was in a large house (not my own, but I felt comfortable there), on a lake or sea (I'm not sure which-but it was large, calm, but vast). I was with several couples, whom I knew in the dream and felt at ease with but can't put names on most after awakening. I was there with a young, prepubescent boy, and in the dream I felt obligation to have an intimate/sexual relationship of sorts with this boy. I felt it was not right, and I remember thinking it would have to wait until he had matured, if ever. This young boy brought me a condom, the condom was different than one I'd ever seen, it was large and reusable, similar in ways to a female condom. I felt absolute in my decision to not be with him when he asked how it worked, even though I myself was unsure. I took the condom and walked out onto the deck, and hid it under a computer desk there. The group was outside quickly after, and a few of them were going out on the water to go fishing. The next thing I remember in the dream is a woman "swimming" back towards the dock (this woman I believed to be a very good friend's mother, someone I've known for 16 years-extremely wealthy family, I feel close to them, but distant in some ways as I've gotten older). Except, she wasn't exactly swimming, she was kind of shooting through the water at warp speed and popped up at the deck I was standing on. Following behind her were thousands or more fish, dead fish, floating on the top of the water and drawn to the deck almost as if by a magnet attached to this woman. I asked how they had fished, and somehow (I don't remember who told me or if I just knew) understood that they had used a method of fishing that was controversial, possibly illegal. It was a weapon that exploded under water but sent out shrapnel to catch all the fish in a several mile radius.

The next thing I remember in the dream was a barge of junk that had been uprooted from the deep sea in the fishing process. At the top of the clump of objects floating in the water were several old, classic cars. As the barge of junk approached the deck, everything was becoming coated in this whiteness. Almost like spray foam that insulates windows, but it was covering everything. As I noticed this whiteness covering the barge of things, I was walking across it. It had formed a sort of large boat. As I was walking across it, I met my father (my waking life father), and we were looking at the old cars, walking from each one to another. I remember thinking I'd like to preserve one for him, possibly with paper-mache. As I walked back onto the deck, I approached a man from the group holding a paper. I asked what it was, and he told me it was a map that he'd commissioned to be made, but it was a secret. He showed me the map, and explained that there were 3 hidden rooms under the sea, and he'd had enough information to work with a mapmaker to find the coordinates. The map had to be a secret, because he would have been in trouble with everyone else if they'd known he'd done this. Suddenly, the man was no longer there and I was holding the map. As I noticed all the other people around, I quickly went to hide the map under the same computer desk on the deck as before, except it was also now covered in the white foam like the barge of sea junk. I hid the map next to the condom I'd earlier hid there. And that is when I remember awaking in my bed, and I grabbed the journal feeling an urgent need to write it down, that there was significance to it. When I re-read what I'd written, I only remembered half, and I barely remember writing it. It felt as though I was in a half-waking space...

Carla's thoughts: As usual with guest dreams, I will think about Elizabeth's dream as if it were my own and hope that it will inspire her to look at the images carefully to ferret out their meaning for her. Only the dreamer can figure out what her dream means, and that's because the images in a dream can mean completely different things to different people. I'm afraid there's no getting around the hard work of figuring out your own dreams.

In my version of Elizabeth's dream, the house represents my Self, the totality of who I am. While I am comfortable in this Self, I don't feel it belongs to me. In other words, I have yet to get in touch with my authentic core. This dream is placing me on course to make that discovery.

The sea is a birth metaphor: my rebirth will take place here. However, as with most of the images in this dream, the sea has contradictory meanings. Yes, it is the place of my rebirth, but it is also the place that obscures the feelings and experiences that make that rebirth a difficult one.

The young boy represents a part of myself that I'm deeply ambivalent about. I feel obligated to integrate, or unite with (have sex with) this aspect of myself, but at the same time this assimilation is distasteful to me (I don't feel it's the right thing to do), and I'm not ready for it (he's not mature.) A condom is something that prevents the union of sperm and egg, and here it symbolizes the barrier to finding out what my union with this young part of myself would bring to fruition. I temporarily avoid the problem by going outside (At least I'm in the process of airing the issue) and placing the impediment (the condom) in my subconscious (under the computer, or thinking function).

The other people in this dream represent various aspects of myself. At times they are the parts that hold the views of a disapproving society, but some are ready to fish around for what's going on in my depths. A pivotal role is played by the woman who swims back to the dock. With her the ambivalence surfaces again: she is someone I am both close to and distant from. This tells me that the information she symbolizes is getting close to consciousness even though I might want to keep it at a distance. Her wealth symbolizes the immensity of my potential.

This process is moving too quickly for my comfort. (She shoots through the water.) She comes from below the surface, and what she brings up is scary and distasteful. Water represents the flow of emotion, and dead fish, according to Tony Crisp, can symbolize the “ non-expression of basic urges.” The magnetic quality of this woman emphasizes the duality of attraction and repulsion, the same ambivalence that we saw earlier with my feelings about my potential sexual union with the young boy. Again I see that something isn't right: the fish (the basic instincts) have been caught in a way that is not only controversial but possibly illegal.

What was murky is bubbling up into enlightenment (the foam with its white color). The underwater explosion that results in foamy whiteness is also evocative of a male orgasm. Cars represent our “drives.” The classic cars take me back to the past, perhaps to a time of my life when one of those drives, the one that results in a male orgasm, would have seemed to me an overwhelming thing that covers (obscures?) everything. I meet my father (the holder of the society's values) and we walk around looking at the cars (drives). Why do I want to give him a paper mache car? Am I trying to make sex drives less substantial, transforming them from the steel of a classic car to the kind of paper children use in craft projects? This hints that the child part of myself does not want to accept adult sexuality. Or perhaps it doesn't want to accept its own (the child's) awareness of that sexuality.

Then I meet the man with the secret map. He is the part of me that is sorting out these old secrets of my Psyche. There are 3 hidden rooms under the sea (in my unconscious). Again we have the unacceptable, the thing I think I'm not supposed to acknowledge. (The mapmaker would be in trouble if it were known he was giving me the route to this secret world.) The map, now covered in the white foam, is stored next to the condom. The various things that I've deemed unacceptable have been dredged up from my depths and are now in one place. I can take them out and look at them when I am ready to: I'm the one who's put them here. These things, hidden right under the computer desk (consciousness) are now very close to the surface. At some point I'll be comfortable taking them out into the fresh air of the deck.

What Am I Giving Up?

The Dream: I have a baby. Another woman desperately wants one so I give it to her. I worry a little about what I've done, but when see how very tenderly the woman treats the infant I feel the child will be well cared for. Then another troublesome thought: The baby has been adopted. How will she bond with anyone after all these changes?

Interpretation: I feel that I should give away some part of myself that I treasure (the baby) to fulfill another's need. I trust the person to tenderly care for this part of me, yet I soon question whether I've neglected my responsibility by relinquishing it. This part has been adopted, implying that it is something I've consciously chosen. The unconscious warns that giving it away to another's care might hamper its development.

Bald as an Egg

The Dream: I'm attracted to a small, unappealing, no longer young little man. His head is egg-shaped, and he's as bald as an egg. We are close to having sex when I remember that I'm a married woman.

“I've never cheated on my husband,” I say. But at the moment I say it, I'm planning to. Suddenly the mood changes; it's as if this practical consideration has awakened others, and I no longer want to go through with it. He also seems to have lost interest. In fact, he might have lost interest before I did.

Interpretation: In my youth an egg-head was anyone who appeared intelligent. In the dream I'm attracted to the intellect passionately, but it doesn't seem practical, partially due to my age (like the little man, I'm no longer young) and partially due to the fact that intellectual pursuits are innately impractical. In any case, the dream tells me that I see them as inappropriate. By cheating on my husband (animus) I ignore, or attempt to ignore, the practical contingencies of life, but soon discover I'm not really interested in following this path. With this fizzling of passion, the dream points out that I need to ask myself just what it is that I'm "married" to, and whether or not it's time for a new interest.

Experimenting on Myself

The Dream: A woman inside a test tube or beaker.

Interpretation: I'm feeling bottled up, but—at the same time—I'm becoming experimental, ready to try new things.