Dreams

[Kris Avery]

I just dream that I was never married to my ex wife.

Seriously, I think that just last night I had my first dream where I woke up [in a very long time] and was repulsed (much more so than usual) by men in the dream.

[becky77]

You said it yourself. Imagination. However vivid the dream, you actually have no idea whatsoever what it feels like to be pregnant.

Maybe it's a past life memory

[Starling]

I don't usually see myself in my dreams; it's all POV. Most often I'm looking for someone I can't ever find, or I'm lost in a familiar setting, on an errand I can't define. I'm often with-but-not-with lots of other people who all seem to have functions and duties, and I'm pestering them unsuccessfully to see where I can fit in. Nothing sexy about that. They're dreams that leave me more tired than when I went to sleep.

But I had a dream years ago in which I forgot myself and went outside in a pair of high-heeled Candies' mules, the ones that were so popular around 1980. I was terribly afraid that someone would see me in them and laugh, but nobody seemed to notice. Does that mean I was a woman in the dream? I'd like psychoanalysts only to answer, please.

Lallie

[Jorja]

Lallie - I am not a psychoanalyst but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.........

[Starling]

That's good enough for me, Jorja! Otherwise, shrinks only.

Lallie

[pamela7]

Jessika, you say it yourself - your dreams are "me full time", there's no more to be said.

[Leah Lynn]

Most of the dreams that I do remember, are distorted replays of my military missions. Some I'm still male; some I'm female. I don't dwell on them. Many years ago a navy psychiatrist told me that dreams were just the brain having fun at our expense.

Leah

[Frances]

I dreamed yesterday that my father had been an astronaut. I was his daughter in the dream, even though he died when I was quite young. He played some sport on the Moon that looked like Croquet, but with a soccer ball. There also were abandonned cities on the Moon, and the astronauts were trying very to hold their breath while visiting them. Later on in the same dream, I was male astronaut Gus Grissom. I had to explain why I had pulled the hatch too early, and then watched myself burn at the Kennedy Space Center.

Does that make me a woman or a man? I don't give a hoot. I like dreaming weird stuff like that. My gender and sex are characteristics of my waking life. In my dreams I get to be Gus Grissom.

[Starling]

Wonderful dream, Frances! And it's so smart to just relax and enjoy them. Did you ever dream of being chased by a giant policeman, while trying to escape on a playground swing? Doesn't work, even in a dream.

Lallie

[Dana44]

Oh Oh, I woke up this morning dreaming as a female again. Patterns... If you note your dreams in a journal then you can look at the patterns. Try to write everything you can remember on the dreams. After a while you can see a pattern emerging on the true value of those dreams. It may not be a gender issue and something else that will make sense to you.

[LeaP]

Does it make any difference? That depends on your view of dreams, I suppose. If you think they are mindless manifestations and replays of the day and your issues, then no. 100 years of modern psychological thought as well as several thousand years of human tradition gives them a lot more weight than that, however.

I strongly suspect that you did not wake up thinking you were actually Gus Grissom. Not being a spiritualist, I also doubt that you were channeling him. When I started dreaming myself in female roles, I woke up knowing they were "correct" (in the gender sense, that is, not that I believed I was Amelia Earhart or something) and they were me.

I have been told that cross sex dreaming is not only highly significant, but virtually unheard of if there is not some cross sex identity. For that to be meaningful, there obviously has to have be some sense of it's reality and not that is not just acting out apart. Think the imagination can create actual cross sex identity, then I submit that any CD engaging in a fantasy really is a woman.

The OP asks whether dreaming of herself full-time is significant. Probably. I doubt whether there is any standardized interpretation of it. The other arose from therapeutic observations. But all dreaming is symbolic and all dreaming is meaningful at some level. You don't dream – you will die.

[Frances]

I was actually Fred Ward as Gus Grissom (the actor in The Right Stuff). There are studies about cross sex dreaming? I watched the Nova episode on dreaming. From that show, I got that not much is known about dreaming. Again, we are talking about dreaming, not fantasy or projection or wishful thinking. I guess what I am saying is that I put very little stock in the significance of dreams on a litteral level. Even dreaming about cross sexual identities can actually be about something else.

[Karen62]

For years I have dreamt of being caught dressed as a woman in front of family, friends or at work. Sometimes my body had natural breasts, but it was always just me, so I don't know how to parse whether I was a man or a woman int he dream. But one thing is for sure - in the past couple of years, those dreams where I was dressed as a woman in front of people I knew were not bad dreams. In those dreams, no one noticed that anything was wrong. It was just natural and normal for me. Huh - I hadn't realized that before. Just another missed clue for so long. I kind of like that.

Karen