I had four dreams last night. In the third dream, I began by moving from a backstage area in a theater, through a kind of sanctuary in a church that was also a restaurant, and finally into an elevator lobby in something like a hotel.
This imagery definitely comes from my experiences over the weekend. Over the weekend I attended two dance performances -- the ODC/Dance performance of The Velveteen Rabbit and the Ballet Ariel performance of Appalachian Spring and Ballerinas by Degas.
Here's a video about ODC/Dance's The Velveteen Rabbit, to give you an idea of the show.
I also wrote a Twitter thread about The Velveteen Rabbit, which is here.
But I think the Ballet Ariel performance of Appalachian Spring and Ballerinas by Degas gave a lot more inspiration to the imagery.
Here's a link to my Twitter thread about the Ballet Ariel performance.
Ballet Ariel's Ballerinas by Degas is an original dance, choreographed by Ilena Norton, and based on Degas' paintings of ballerinas. It is largely based in the ballet studio, though there are some moments showing the ballerinas on stage, performing. A couple key moments depict these performances from a backstage point of view. That imagery was really unique and powerful. I think that's why I found myself backstage in my dream.
Yesterday I also watched the great Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon.
In The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire plays a down-on-his-luck actor whose career is revived by a musical written by his two best friends, but produced by an eccentric classical actor/producer and co-starring a prima ballerina. There are a lot of backstage scenes in The Band Wagon, too. But those scenes are grand -- and usually grand disasters! So I think a lot of the imagery of strange wiring in my dreams comes from these backstage scenes in The Band Wagon.
The body switching idea in my first dream may also have come from The Band Wagon, as there's a musical number in the musical where the Cyd Charisse character plays a blonde woman and a brunette. The Fred Astaire character plays a detective hunting for a criminal. He thinks the criminal is a man. But it ends up being the blonde woman dressed as a man. This is partly where I think the body switching idea and the gender switching idea comes from.
The idea of the body I've switched into being "rejected" (like a rejected transplant) comes partly from an article I recently read about a man receiving his second face transplant, after his first face was rejected.
The body I've switched into, as well as my old body, oddly enough, are a lot like a mix between three images, I feel: Robocop (the face), the Svedka girl, and the armored suits the Black Panther heroes wear.
I'm not really sure what this means. I was supposed to become a woman. And the woman I was supposed to switch bodies with was supposed to become a man. But we both became robots. And our (robot) bodies were possibly being rejected -- by our bodies. So our whole bodies were somehow being rejected by our whole bodies. Weird.
This idea of an entire body rejecting itself is probably based, though, in my sense of not being in very good health at all. Over the past three years I've been in some very stressful situations. But 2017 was so bad, especially in terms of work, that I seriously feel at one point that I may have done some major damage to my arteries. Since mid-2017, I've sort of felt like the condition of my vascular system has been getting worse and worse. So I'm not surprised to have a dream where my body is rejecting my body.
In my first and third dream I am faced with going up a dark tower -- a stairway in the first dream and an elevator bank in the third. That image, traveling upward in a dark tower, may also be related to death.
But this imagery may also be related to transition. In my fourth dream, I am basically traveling from one city center to another -- maybe from one city center to a city center in another country/continent! The fact that the buildings I am traveling to and from are Capitol buildings leads me to believe, given elements of my waking life, that I am, at least unconsciously, working out a new (probably a final) professional trajectory for my life.
I also deal with some issues of being attracted to, as well as socially awkward or nervous around, children. This is definitely related to senses I had of social anxiety around kids and adults while I was at the performances this weekend. I am trying to be less closed in when I'm in social settings like the theater, because I think it makes the people around me feel more at ease. I feel like my dreams were trying to work that out.
In terms of the adult baby diaper dream -- I think people may know that I have that fetish -- an adult baby fetish. When I was younger I could fit into baby diapers. Over the past two or three years I've gained so much weight that I can't. So I can only fit into adult baby diapers, which I basically hate. So in the dream, I dreamed that I had my younger, fitter body back -- and that adult baby diapers actually looked cute on me.
