Jeane: In this dream I’m leaning on a bed and there’s another woman standing on the other side. We’re talking about men. There are some men in the room at another table and I make a comment, saying “I really wouldn’t ever go out with a man from Yugoslavia because they just don’t accept women at a certain level.”
I joke that now that I’ve made that statement, I’ll probably have someone show up who’s an exception or I’ll get in trouble for it. There are some German men in the room and I say that I don’t think my statement applies to German men, though.
Then I notice a man I’ve always been attracted to sitting on the other side of the room. He’s very accomplished, but he’s not feeling well. At one point I go over to him after he’s gone into another room to lie down.
I think I give him a kiss and then we have a friendly, but casual conversation. We make some jokes. He wants to know if I want to go back to his house, and I say, “No, as far as my boyfriend is concerned, that kiss has already crossed the line.” Besides, he’s not feeling well and needs to rest.
Then I go into another part of the building where there’s a bathroom. It’s strange. You have to go down a corridor and then turn into the place where the stalls are. But when I turn the corner, I’m not certain. I know I’m spooking myself in a way. I’m very clear about it, but it doesn’t feel quite right to me.
I go back down the hallway and, sure enough, I hear a toilet flush, and someone comes out. For some reason, I don’t want them to see me. There are a few stall-like rooms that I can enter, so I turn around. One of these stalls suddenly turns into a bathroom, but there’s a woman in there so I can’t use it.
I open the door to another one and it just turns into a dead end, but I try to conceal myself there. I realize that part of the wall disappears and someone is standing on the other side with a bare bottom. I think I reach over and pinch them, while at the same time I’m a little apprehensive about someone else who is coming down the hallway.
I think that’s when I wake up.
John: That’s a really peculiar dream in that you set the note, or the premise, for the dream by indicating that there are certain things that you won’t put up with, that you won’t deal with, and then you are confronted by a flow of things that potentially includes that which you reject.
Then when you see that you’re doing that, because you’ve taken a particular set position and the flow contradicts that position, you then find yourself having to hide. But you can’t really hide yourself because the awkwardness of what you’re doing reveals that the flow that you experienced was exhilarating, or touched you in some way, and is in keeping with how you’re meant to awaken.
It reminds me of an article in the newspaper a while back in which Paris Hilton was supposedly kissing a stranger in the dark when suddenly the light came on and she realized it was a black man, and she says, “Ugh!”
The comment circulated and was picked up by the tabloids and it was treated as a racial reaction. Yet at the same time, in that moment of the kiss, there was probably a part of her that was opening up. Then she shut it down and became very trite and benign again.
It also reminds me of another incident in which there was a teacher I knew ages ago whose eyes started suddenly twinkling when I was having reaction to something because, from her perception, my reaction was over the top, which indicated that something behind it needed to be revealed. In other words, my reaction was suppressing my ability to catch up with a particular quality of a flow of my being that was important.
Your dream seems to do all of this. First of all, it has a part that shows a discrimination or prejudice, and then you realize that you need to be more conscious and not define or label things, and then there’s the part where there’s openness where you share a kiss.
But you then have a reaction to something, which causes you to feel the need to conceal or hide yourself. You could almost say your dream is also the story of Adam and Eve, where they find themselves in the Garden, but then deviate by eating the apple which they shouldn’t have, and then they feel guilty and want to hide themselves.
What resulted from eating the forbidden fruit was that they were cut off from a flow that had been naturally there for them. That became the theme of human life in Creation – all stemming from that singular incident – that we’ve been trying to let go of, in terms of our guilt and our attitudes, ever since. It’s an usual, symbolic dream.
