I brought this dream to Lorenzo which had been on my mind since I dreamed it last September. I blogged about it in Hoping For My Other Half to Come Back to Life. It has stood out in my mind ever since as something significant, so I wanted to get Lorenzo’s take on it. Lorenzo listened and asked me if I had a girlfriend who was going through some serious problems at the time I had the dream.
I thought for a while, and I was just about to mention my flatmate at the time, the Transformer, who I blogged about in Another Door Opens, again in A Transsexual Puzzle, again in When a Woman Cries, and finally in The Ice Man Cometh Home. But before I could say anything, Lorenzo corrected himself and said,
“No. Better someone who was in trouble a short time before the dream.”
I thought again. The only person I could think of was my previous flatmate in Poland, Basia. She had struggled with anorexia and bulimia for ten years and it had gotten to the point where she had been hospitalized, her teeth were rotting from being continually bathed in acid when she vomited, and her hand was scarred from grating against her teeth as she habitually shoved her hand down her throat to engage her gag reflexes.
When I realized the seriousness of her condition (because she had confided in me about it), I was terribly worried for her, because I was afraid that she was going to end up killing herself if she kept it up. She had gotten to be a very close friend in a short period of time, and was one of those people who seem to carry a bright light in their soul that shines out through their eyes and in their smile. I didn’t want to see that light extinguished, yet I felt so helpless to do anything about it. There were a few times when I had cried myself to sleep thinking about the tragedy of it all.
“What is her name?” Lorenzo asked.
“Basia.”
“Dasha,” he repeated, and began to swing his pendulum.
“No, not Dasha… Basia.”
“Ah, Dasha.” He began with the pendulum again. I couldn’t seem to make him hear the difference between the two names, so I just let it go. I figured the name probably wasn’t the important thing anyway. It was more based on the energy and the real identity of the person.
“Yes, it’s Dasha,” Lorenzo said after a minute. “What happened to her?”
I explained that Basia had committed herself to a summer rehab program and seemed to be doing well. In fact, she had already been out of the rehab program for a while before I had the dream.
Lorenzo looked at me. “You have struggled with similar issues, haven’t you?”
“Sort of, but not really. Not like that.”
There were just a few times where I stopped eating for a couple of weeks, because I was upset about something (romantic betrayals, all). It hadn’t been a conscious decision any of those times. It was just that, upon learning of the betrayals, my stomach twisted into knots and refused to accept food. And, as anyone who has ever fasted can tell you, once you stop eating for a day or two, the stomach starts rejecting food of its own free will. I’d had to force feed myself back to health, starting with easy food to swallow like ice cream and apple sauce. One time, it had gotten so bad that I could only bring myself back with liquid vitamins.
“And when you were standing on the apex of that anticline,” continued Lorenzo, “Dasha was calling you over to the other side. She was tempting you to re-enter that cycle of self abuse. And you asked yourself what it would be like to be buried in that cycle again, but ultimately, you chose life.”
There was more to his interpretation, and I’ve forgotten a lot of it, because it has been so long now since that session that I had with Lorenzo, but the long and the short of it is that it just didn’t ring true for me. I talked about it with Lolita that night over dinner. I told her about how I was originally going to mention the Transformer (TT), whose troubles were going on at the time I had the dream, or at least I became aware of her troubles around that time. It still seemed to me that TT’s issues were more closely linked to this dream than Basia’s… at least TT’s issues as they related to me, and those issues were twofold.
First, there was the issue of sexual orientation that I had mentioned in my original dream post. I’d been living on the fence between hetero and homo for most of my life, but I had always remained on the hetero side. Still, there had always been a curiosity to experience the other side for almost as long as I could remember. And now, TT, with her infatuation with me, was offering me that chance, but I was finding myself deciding to remain right where I was. Something about her “offer” seemed unsafe to me.
Second, in conjunction with the gender issues that TT was grappling with, were her issues with depression, and that was a much bigger slippery slope for me than gender issues ever could be. I’ve lived on the border between depression and normality for all my life, and that border could be represented by the summit of the anticline. It has never taken much to send me tumbling over the edge and into severe depression. In fact, less than a year before that, I had gotten seriously suicidal for the first time in my life, and I saw very clearly where that depression could lead me. It could bury me alive.
Through the changes I’d made in my life, I’d managed to crawl out of that depression, but I’d continued to live on the edge. And I’ve always been overly sensitive to other people’s moods, and TT’s depression felt dangerously contagious to me. In fact, her crying fit on the day of my audition had left me unable to perform, unable to confidently socialize with the new people I was meeting. I did feel buried in depression once again. That, and I was having to lock myself in my room to avoid her intrusiveness in my life, so that my room felt like a prison (complete with bars on the window and all). I couldn’t wait to get out of that situation.
And there’s a part of me that has always believed (pathetically) that some prince on a white horse was going to come along and take this depression away from me. That if someone would just fall in love with me, then I would be okay and could get on with the business of living and let the real me shine out again. I was waiting for someone else to do the work that I needed to do for myself. And seeing the sign of life (the water springing up from the ground), and clawing at it with my bare hands represented me taking control of my own destiny and trying to save myself.
After Lolita and I talked about this, and we both agreed that my interpretation made more sense than Lorenzo’s, (because Basia had never tried to entice me over to her way of life, and I was certainly never tempted to go that way), I realized that the way that Lorenzo had mixed up the names, saying Dasha instead of Basia, was telling in itself… because Dasha is the diminutive (nickname) for the Czech name Dagmar, which is TT’s real name (at least it’s her given name… she goes by a man’s name in her day-to-day life). I don’t know how heavily the name influenced Lorenzo’s interpretation or if he was just having an off day, but I do know one thing…
As I was reading back through this dream, and all the comments posted by my fellow soulcast dream interpreters in the original post, I think we did a much deeper level of analysis last year than either Lorenzo, Lolita or I did this year. You guys are great, and I think the fact that you all know some things about my life really helps. And some of you have an awful lot of experience and intuition to tap into as well. And the back and forth discussion really helps the interpretation go to a deeper level. We certainly saw a great example of that in My Dream About Cancer. So, I will continue to bring my dreams to this forum for your collective insights and wisdom. Thank you all.
