April, 2011: Here is my dream: A woman is led in on a horse and it is announced that she is running for the Senate. Her face is very yellow and one eye droops. Then I am riding up the statehouse steps on a horse. I try to control it, but finally give up and get off. It shakes its mane and becomes a young frisky tiger cub. I follow it to the lawn where it romps with other tiger cubs and other young animals. A man is there, and we enjoy the romping animals together. Later I go up to the yellow-faced woman to say hello. We hug, but she says something that makes me think she’s not who I think she is. Then she says something about some writing I did for her, so it must be her…I’m confused.
I know this yellow-faced woman in my psyche. She is the Renaissance woman in me who can do anything, exudes confidence, takes charge, strategizes, plays the social-political card to a T. There is no chink in her armor. She’ll run for the Senate and win, and everyone will listen to her great wisdom.
But the real me in this dream is the young tiger cub playing with the other cubs, in the care of the man who watches over us, the man I call Animus. I know this tiger cub in me, too, although it is less prevalent in my life than the yellow-faced woman. The tiger cub has no strategy, she loves and plays with abandon, because she knows she is watched over.
I feel sadness rising in me writing about the tiger cub, because in this moment the choice is so clear: yellow-faced woman or tiger cub. And I know how often I choose the woman.
This morning, waking up, I glance at the clock—it’s later than I expected, which means my husband and I probably won’t go for a morning run today. He likes to get out by a certain time so he can get to work. I don’t check in with where I am in myself. I say to him, “I guess we’re not running today.” Writing it now, I can feel the anger in it—the implication that if he’d gotten up earlier, we could have gone. Do I even want to run, though? I feel a little scratchiness in my throat. So I say that: “I feel something in my throat.” There’s some sense of orienting myself here to what’s happening, smoothing something over.
The beginning of my day, the beginning of my life, is already controlled by the yellow-faced woman. I can tell myself this is benign, a casual exchange about the day. No one is charged, no fight here. But I can feel the woman in me that is running for the Senate. I can feel the officiousness, the underlying anger, the coldness, the strategizing. I can feel it in my body. It feels terrible. And so, so familiar, like a well-worn shirt I just won’t give up.
Another dream:
A scene plays out over and over in gray tones—no color. A young girl, 7 or 8, rides a motorcycle and crashes. The last time this happens, I am a girl watching, in gray tones.
I believed at first that this girl in gray tones watching was free from the crash, but she is simply disassociated from it. This is the ghost-me that doesn’t want to feel the deep pain that lives in me. At some time in this life or another, I experienced a devastating trauma. This dream shows it, as have many others. And I know it in me, knew it even when I was a child—that something very terrible must have happened to me that I would feel such terror all the time, such unbearable sorrow. But I bucked up, pulled myself together and became the yellow-faced woman running for the Senate. Better that than feel the crash. That woman is still able to offer me this sweet deal—high horse rather than motorcycle crash—and I still buy it.
My next dreams brought the correction:
I am walking with a black teenage girl in the desert. The sands suddenly open up and swallow her up. I dig frantically, but it’s no use.
This girl is my devastated true self, and I am standing above, watching, again. The dream offers the invitation to be the girl swallowed up. When I do, I am overcome with grief.
Dream:
My dad and I are walking on a rickety bridge high over brown, churning water. He leaps into the water, but I am too scared to follow him.
My work right now is to follow my dad off the bridge. When I do, I feel many things--the terror of falling, a howling pain that nails me to the present moment, stands me up, my father’s love, a clear, sure presence of myself.
When I am the yellow-faced woman, I can feel the double-mind think-spin, the conniving, the calculating, the constant defensiveness. In the water I feel like a single soul, experiencing my life, feeling what is here to feel, this welcome pain that howls and howls and turns then to the love.
This is a minute-to-minute fight to keep jumping in my fear off the bridge into the churning water. The yellow-faced woman dies in that moment. What is the promise of living every moment in the water with my father?