Jeane: OK, I’m still in the Jeep, but the scene shifts completely. I am riding back to a checkpoint to go into a military compound. It feels like the person driving the Jeep is an officer, and I am a man, also an officer. I am someone who reminds me of a character in a mystery novel I read who was an MP and totally military, but had left the military because of politics and something else he listened to inside. But he is often called back to troubleshoot problems because he can operate with a certain freedom in the world. I am like that character – kind of husky, wearing the uniform more casually, a certain sense of humor, and not taking a lot of military protocol too seriously.
I have been called upon because a group of officers in a tent on this military compound needs some help with something. When we reach the checkpoint the guard there is deadly serious. I realize the guy has no sense of humor, and also that the people in the tent I am going to help do not have any sense of humor either. So I feel a sense of frustration, wondering how can I really help when they are all so serious?
It feels like I woke up with that note. It is similar to a frustration I am feeling in the outer world. I am wondering if there is a certain kind of empathy about things or a certain kind of worry that I should be feeling that I am not. It seems like there is an imbalance in me, that I’m not really dealing with, that is causing this stress. But some of my stress is actually in thinking that I should feel more upset about things than I do. It’s confusing: sometimes I feel as though I want to have more of a sense of humor toward life, and sometimes I feel I take everything too lightly.
John: As a woman, when you dream yourself as a man, it represents an aspect of your higher self. One trait of the masculine, in its full essence as your higher self, is the sense of awe and majesty. So it is paradoxical that the feminine aspect of you, finding itself holding on too tightly, has to catch up and balance by accessing this sense of awe. Awe has a quality of detachment to it, so then you find yourself wondering how to hold onto the caring quality (of the feminine) as well.
In your particular case, you can see that something regal is taking place – you are an officer being driven to help a group of fellow officers, yet you have a feeling of aloofness from them, that you are above the protocol of it. So that is a masculine sense of majesty. And the contradiction comes from the feminine side that wants an intimacy and sense of connection. So these are opposite urges, but true balance requires both.
The quality of the feminine can be a great nurturer to all of life. It’s almost as if… without that quality of higher-self recognition – the awe and majesty – if you did not have that, you would be left feeling the pain of things that are happening around you too deeply. You’d find yourself getting hit hard by events and become reactive to them, without necessarily knowing what to do about them. You want to keep a heartfulness toward life, but not falsely, not as a coping device.
As a coping device, the degree to which you hold a natural compassion toward life can leave you feeling wounded. So you try to add the majesty while maintaining the quality of compassion. The majesty brings genuineness to the feelings of compassion, which is very different from compassion that arises out of guilt or cultural programming or as a defense mechanism. So the masculine and the feminine in balance bring a depth to the understanding.
Your dream is showing that you have both aspects, which gives you a capacity to roll with the punches that life throws at you.
