Quartet of Dreams

DREAMS & BITS:

1) I am looking down from our 2nd or 3rd floor home out of the front window and seeing some people walk their dogs on the ground below. One dog I noticed was wearing a very fashionable and tailored outfit. I point this out to my mother who is in the room but she is dismissive.

2) I have just pulled my car into the parking pad outside our house when another car drives by between my car and our front door, deftly turned in front of my car and pulled into a space in the parking pad next to ours, literally a hair away from an identical car already parked there and lines up to it perfectly. A young woman with long black wavy hair gets out and I compliment her on her parking skill. She makes a vague noise or gesture and leaves. I head to our door and notice the dash of my ex-husband’s car is crammed full of garbage like candy wrappers and old pieces of paper. Somehow my car is parked inside his like a car on a ferry boat. I took out some of the garbage to get rid of it.

3) I see a woman stripping herself naked swiftly and pulls a long dress over herself. The dress is of natural fibre like sackcloth and sewn like a wide loop, with a hole at one end for the head and 2 holes at the other for the feet to go through. The sides are of course, completely open.

4) I walk into the house and see my dad’s blueprints on the table (he was an engineer), I wonder to myself whether he got bored with retirement or did the company ask him to work. There was the word ‘Queen’ or ‘Queensway’ on it.

DREAMWORK:

1) I am up in my head looking down again, keeping my safe distance from the general unwashed world out there, down there. Dogs are for me the sociable, eager-to-please faces we put on in public, but a drive for survival nonetheless. I see other people as overdressing their public personas, for acceptance, for ambition, for power, but do I still have that need in myself, even though I’ve distanced myself from that world? My own assessment is that I am less so than I used to be, but how firmly grounded am I? I am not so detached that I have stopped noticing what goes on in the world of achievement and acquisition and vertical growth. I am still comparing myself to them everyday, telling myself that I’m not like them, that I’m following a higher calling, etc. But underneath all that peptalk is fear. I am still shaky in my faith, and my mother in the dream, my shadow and my critic, is less than impressed.

2) The woman in this dream is not unlike my mother in the first dream. They are both dismissive of me, not bothering to look at me nor talk to me. As shadow figures, they are a bit hostile. Perhaps because I am not receptive to them?

I made it home in my car, my personal vehicle and drive, and parked – I have arrived. Everything was just ever so slightly smaller than normal, kind of hobbit-sized, and the parking pad was really just dug out of dirt and crude, a bit primitive and ‘organic’ looking. Everything was also compactly spaced, although it felt more cozy than claustrophobic. The woman, my neighbour, my shadow, drove right around me, coming up from my right and across to my left, expertly. There was just enough space for her car to get by, and she managed the 90˚ corner as only a dream can accommodate. But she went straight to the spot, didn’t waste any time or energy. The car beside hers was a twin, and like 2 front teeth they were so close together. So my shadow is driven by several things? An identical pair, plus a different one off to one side (there was another car already parked there off to one side). Hmmm… I’ve the feeling the 2 identical cars are 2 halves of a whole, a split. She is driven by a split, plus another that has been there longer.

Then to my surprise I discovered that I was actually parked ‘inside’ my ex-husband’s car, his drive, a part of my masculine I had rejected and thought I was done with long ago. What part of me, or my drive, does he represent? Worldly, immature, primitive, crude, an echo of the parking space, and apparently unkempt with old garbage. At the same time grounded in the physical, and relies mostly on survival instincts. Being in the physical and instinctive is not usually my forté, therefore what I need. I need more brawn to go with my brain, but I have old issues with it, which is really just garbage I can let go of now.

The dream is showing me what’s going on with my feminine, what my shadow wants me to know, as well as what needs to be done for my masculine. These are personal level, close-to-home stuff that I can take care of, although I am at a loss to say what the split is in my feminine. And why isn’t she living with me, but next door? Is she a part I’ve rejected? The long black wavy hair suggests a romantic freedom, perhaps an ideal I’ve disconnected from? She was wearing a dark thick winter coat, so maybe to do with depression and a cold indifference? I certainly got that feeling from her. I am reminded suddenly that that’s how I was when I was married to my ex – young and idealistic to begin with, later hardened into bitterness and indifference. I have never brought her back into my embrace, even as I healed those old wounds, never loved her back into life. She is stuck in that image I have of myself then, all I’ve done for her is admit that she is a part of my nature. I know her, but I do not love her. I call her The Bitch, as in Bitch-on-Wheels, which she definitely was in this dream, ha ha…! The unconscious can be so subtle and blunt at the same time… The Bitch is impatient, brusque, cold, and immune to flattery because she is so jaded and toughened by her bitterness. Most of all, she hates men, and my ex was definitely the prime target for all of my venom.

So there’s old garbage I need to clean up, old beliefs like stereotyping the kind of man my ex was, and stereotyping men in general – the insensitive, inconsiderate, tunnel-visioned, infantile meatheads that they are – as my rantings went yesterday on my way to the grocery store. I know very well that biologically men are women are made for different functions but ALL serve Life, so why do I still cling to the old conditioning that ‘women and men are equal’ means we can all do and excel at the same thing? We don’t, just as one person does not necessarily excel in the same thing as the next person. I need to see through that unforgiving way of looking at gender equality through the militant feminist lens, which is often extreme and just as biased as what it tries to balance against. This is what lurks in my shadow, and that’s the split in my feminine. In my heart I have learned the truth, though my head is still crammed with old garbage.

3) Woman in a simply and ingeniously designed sack dress… hmmm… Is she a monk? A penitant? I can see how I’ve wanted to become someone like that, detach from the ties that bind, and trade it all in for the drastically simpler and more single-minded way of life of the retreatant. The loop form of the dress is significant, because it suggests a circle, endlessness. The retreat does not end with time, it is a state of mind, a way of life that continues even when I move on to do something else in life, even when I go back out into the world, even when I am busy doing something else besides contemplation. I don’t have to renounce the world in order to live in sacred contemplation. But why the open sides? It leaves me vulnerable from the sides, because I need that vulnerability, that openness, as I’ve only lately discovered.

4) My dad, my masculine authority, has chosen to come out of ‘retirement’ and accept work in his old trade (engineering). But the prominence of the word ‘Queen’ tells me that this time the authority is also feminine. I am coming back out of my retirement from the world and returning to my old work. Healing? Design? No… Creativity. I am coming back as my creative best.