This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
There were two main images that struck me in last night's dream: the grey aspect of the young man, and the weird "lingerie" attached to the cowgirl boots.
The cowgirl boots are white leather. The strap attached to them is a crepe-like lingerie material that is pink at the edges and white toward the center. That color style is common, I think, to lingerie and, I believe, to women's clothes in general. Then, in the center of that strap, is a flower.
I can see a lot of influences from my waking life on the lingerie itself. The lingerie somehow reminded me, as I woke up, of an image in the Pedro Almodovar film Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?, which I watched a few nights ago. The film is about a working-class family in Spain. The father is a taxi driver, and the mother does all kinds of cleaning jobs.
There are a couple of children in the family, both boys. The younger boy is only about eleven or twelve years old, but he apparently carries on all kinds of homosexual relationships. A woman living across the hallway from the family works as a prostitute and is one of the wife's best friends.
One night, the older brother says he'll give the neighbor 10 pesetas (?) worth of heroin if she'll try to attract his brother. So the neighbor takes the younger brother home after he has come home too late (from a romantic adventure) to have dinner with his own family.
The neighbor makes dinner for the younger brother. The neighbor also gets dressed up "special" for dinner -- wearing an item of lingerie that's supposed to make her look like a bride. But it's mostly a white teddy with pink fringes and a veil over the crown of the head. This white and pink piece of lingerie influenced the image of the weird lingerie in my dream.
The flower itself I think comes from the cover for the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. Of course, the main image on that cover is a big magnolia flower. Yesterday I spent a little time singing some songs. One of the songs I sang was Aimee Mann's "Save Me," which is one of the main songs in that soundtrack.
Speaking of flowers, I would like to say that the image of the fading from pink at the edges to white at the center isn't just an image from clothing or familiar to clothing. One flower I love, the dogwood flower, has, for some species, a fading of pink at the edges to white at the center.
But this year -- I'm not sure why it was this year -- I've noticed a lot of varieties of roses out there with a pattern of fading from a darker color at the edges to a lighter color at the center. Many fade from pink to white. But there are some that fade from red to yellow or even orange to yellow. I'm sure that's a usual pattern with certain rose varieties every year. But for some reason it didn't really strike me as being a pervasive thing until this year.
I'm not sure why I had cowgirl boots as an image of my dream. But I would say that, for all the Jung I've read, one of the very few things I always have in my mind is the idea Jung had that footwear in dreams is often an image relating to a person's ability to adapt socially to the world around him.
My overall goal for the dream was to find women's clothing. The boots are really nice. And if footwear is thought of as a person's basic contact with the world, the place where our feet hit the ground, then maybe what the dream is saying is that my worry could be less about finding lingerie and more about finding a way to identify socially in the world around me. I'm really not sure.
What's interesting though about the boots being connected by the strap, which is supposed to be lingerie somehow, is that the strap is centered with a flower. If the flower is a symbol for a vagina, and the vagina is right in the center of this strap, and the strap is, like I said in my entry, about a meter long (maybe it was longer than that), then it's possible that either side of the strap would go along my inner legs and that the flower would become my vagina.
In other words, I think this weird piece of lingerie, rather than being a piece of lingerie, is some kind of sex-change device (I mean, not really, but metaphorically). But what's strange about it is that the most concrete things about it are the boots. But does that mean that the social adaptation makes the sexual identification, or that the sexual identification makes the social adaptation?
I could easily see the two sides of the strap as something like the aorta (?) arteries, the big arteries that flow down the center of our legs. These arteries are essential to life, or at least essential to the legs, I'd guess. Anyway, if a big artery like that is blocked, or if it stops functioning, a person can die. That's pretty obvious.
So, in this dream, if the flower is at the center of these straps, and the straps flow down to the boots, does the "blood" from this center, this "vagina," create the social identity? Or, because the cowgirl boots, the most concrete, most identifiable part of this outfit, are so "real," do they stabilize, and thus stand as responsible for or the creators of, the feminine arteries that lead up to this "vagina?" I really don't know.
The other aspect of the dream which is interesting is the grey man. The grey man seems like he's either insane or on drugs. He has that quality in common with two other characters from my recent dreams. One is an old man in the fifth dream of this dream journal entry. The other is Mr. Rogers himself, from the second dream of this dream journal entry.
I think that in both of those dreams I was pretty at a far distance from the man. In this dream I start out at a distance from the man. I try to avoid him. But he eventually overtakes me, grabs me, and tries to have sex with me.
Why is the man grey? I think this is partly in reaction to my own reflections on some of my other dreams. In one of the dreams, I'm a woman. I'm in a room where no lights are on. The only light comes from the moon. It makes everything, including myself, look blue. In another dream, I've met Michael Jackson in a basement storage or janitorial area. The fluorescent light is so dim down in that room that everything, including Michael Jackson, looks green. In this dream, a lot of the environment is grey. So I think I made the man grey, to match my thoughts about the other dreams.
But the fact that the man is grey reminds me also of the concept of the "classic grey" alien, probably the most popular face for the modern conception of what an extraterrestrial being would look like. In that case, the attempted rape scene in my dream would be something like an attempted alien abduction.
But I don't think the scene is anything like a reenactment of an actual abduction. Rather, what I think is that the alien in my dream stands for an alien sexual urge. This "alien," or unconscious, instinct, which is really just a part of myself, grabs a hold of me and tries to get me to have sex, or unite with it. I break free of the instinct and basically tell it, "No means no!"
What's interesting, too, is that the alien doesn't, for instance, pull down my pants. Instead, he lifts up my shirt and strokes my stomach and chest. He's pressing himself against my back, and probably against my bottom, too. But he doesn't necessarily seem too worried about having sex with me right away. He seems more interested in seducing me. And he seems to want to do so by stroking my stomach and chest. This doesn't mean, of course, that if I'd been motionless, or too weak to push away, that he wouldn't have eventually pulled down my pants and screwed me...
But after I tell the alien I'm not interested, he follows me, yelling after me the whole time. I think part of the reason for this is that the alien instinct is probably my shadow instinct. That's another one of the few Jungian concepts my feeble mind has been able to carry along with it through the years. The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, because it is the stuff about ourselves we would feel ashamed to acknowledge. The grey of the alien in my dream may come from his character as the shadow.
So the shadow was trying to integrate with my conscious. That's actually a good thing, a healthy thing, when the shadow and conscious ego integrate. But when I don't allow the shadow to integrate, he follows me, like a rude guy on the street, following a girl who spurned him, calling her a whore, and so forth. Of course, he's not calling the girl a whore so much as trying to pull her down from what he sees as her pedestal, so she won't think she's "too good" to have sex with him.
That's a pretty silly tactic men use. But the alien, as my shadow, proceeds to use it with me. He's trying to pull me down from my pedestal, or break me out of my shell, so that I won't try to integrate with whatever is embodied in my fetishism, and I will try to integrate with him.
But for some reason, the alien has been trying to get me to integrate with him by stroking my stomach and chest -- in other words, my upper body. He follows me to the place where all the women's clothes are. And when I finally pull up the weird lingerie, which I think is an article of clothing that is finally good enough for me, it's completely related to my lower body. The most concrete thing about it is the footwear. The rest of it is a system that basically connects the crotch to the footwear by a lingerie equivalent of arteries.
So I break away from the alien after he tries to seduce my upper body, and I go to a place where I find a new lower body. That all seems like a pretty easy dynamic. But I guess there are still parts -- as always with my dreams -- that I don't understand.
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