Nightmares
Didn’t sleep well at all last night. Particularly a shame because I got to bed early-ish, and was hoping for a good 8.5 hours of sleep…
My first nightmare was set at some sort of bar or club – dim lighting, lots of people drinking, that sort of thing. I was performing burlesque. which is enough of a nightmare that the dream didn’t need to go any further… I was on some sort of couch on a raised platform, facing the rest of the bar.
I began taking off clothing, article by article, and the crowd was going wild. I could feel a charge from the crowd, from their enjoyment of my body. I was putting myself on display, and I was enjoying it.
But as I got down to just underwear (topless, but doing my burlesque best not to show everything) I started to hear upset murmurings from the crowd. It dawned on me that I was in underwear that made it obvious I was trans, so to speak. The crowd – mostly men – was angry at this deception, this offense, this outrage.
I got up from the couch in tears, covering myself with a pillow, and ran to a stairwell. A friend came to try and comfort me, but didn’t understand why I was upset and did a miserable job at calming me down, at which point I woke up.
Later, I had another nightmare, involving a party at an apartment with a deck, overlooking a waterway with docks and boats. Friends were all there, and we found a dead body on the apartment’s deck. (I’m pretty sure we didn’t kill him, but who knows…) We decided – with impeccable dream-logic – to throw the body over the side. I remember the weight of the body, and the thud it made on the wooden planks of the dock. I blame Castle for this, as an episode my roommates and I watched last night began with someone being thrown off a roof.
We then tried to call my dad, who is a lawyer, to see what we should do next. I was totally in a panic, because I was unable to reach him, which is around when I woke up. (As a bonus, this nightmare fed my guilt for not calling my dad more often.)
I don’t think the second nightmare is quite as relevant to larger issues going on in my life, but the first one certainly is. I feel like I’m slowly moving from “I don’t dislike the equipment I have right now, I’d just prefer the alternative” to “Not only do I want a vagina, I dislike that I have a penis.”
I’m working on a longer post about that, just needed to get these dreams out before they faded.
Themocracy
Dreams are the window to the soul, and those online “dream analyses” don’t help.
Most of my dreams still take place in my high school where nobody of note graduated there and only three students and a teacher’s aide left in the “Smartest” case of 1990. ;3
A rather large portion of my dreams (like 85%+) include myself female bodied but everybody else treating me normally and not even noticing (and I don’t point it out). Though it isn’t really the focus of the dream itself, it is a feature of the dream that has been consistent and I feel worthy of note.
I started keeping a dream journal a few years ago, as the first step toward lucid dreaming. I never got past the “keep a dream journal” stage, but I’m still really glad I did it because it has let me see trends like you’re describing.
For example, “school” for me usually means high school, even if college friends are there. “Home” usually means the house I lived in from when I was 9 or 10 to 15, regardless of how old I am in the dream.
I’ve also specifically noticed my body in my dreams changing. I used to be male-bodied in dreams, but over the past two years or so – over the course of transitioning, basically – I’ve noticed that change to either female-bodied or (like the nightmare described in this post) specifically trans. So, on the one hand, I’m glad that my body in both of these dreams was more in line with my conscious gender identity than it was a few years ago, I wish my stresses and worries could find a better way to work themselves out… =p
I am considering keeping a journal after your article.
But I’m cis, or at least I think I am…
These dreams have been a major point of confusion for me, this is when I’ve really started questioning myself.
I mean, in the dreams, I’m female but I’m still me and it isn’t a drastic change. None of them involve sex at all.
The first time it happened years ago, I was female and people were laughing at me, but now it’s just… normal.
I really need to find out what all of this means.
I had a sort of similar dream last night. It was one of those naked at school dreams: I was at my high school (which, incidentally, was on a boat in the middle of the ocean), but instead of being actually naked I was in a t-shirt and boxers, and without a binder so I was folding my arms across my chest over & over & over again. It was more of a stress dream than a nightmare, with me constantly remembering I was in my underwear and sans binder and not knowing why and looking for my pants. Never found them.
I want a high school boat!
And yeah, I’d agree this was more a stress dream than a nightmare, I just apparently blanked on the phrase “stress dream” when writing this post…
I do think it’s interesting the way body issues manifest themselves in dreams, though. Have you been wearing a binder regularly? How has the experience been?
Oh yeah — I’ve worn a binder everyday since I bought one a couple of months ago, and I was wearing an almost as flattening bra for a month or two before that. The experience has been really good (I’m never going back!), but it’s definitely changed how I relate to my body. I feel really naked without it.