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Abortion, Suicide, Rebirth

Dreamed 1974 by Christine Downing, as told to Patricia Ariadne

Christine began the interview by recounting a dream that had heralded the end of a period of intense suffering. The dream had occurred nearly thirty years earlier, at a time when she was in the deepest despair of her life. For months she had not dreamed at all, and it seemed to her that the underworld had completely claimed her soul. "There seemed no point in my body continuing," she shared, "as the absence of my dream-life seemed evidence that there wasn't any soul alive, nothing left growing, hoping, green."

Christine had decided to swim into the ocean until, tiring on the darkening sea, she would be swept down and under.

The night before she planned her death, Christine dreamed, and she noted, "In a lot of ways just the fact of dreaming again was itself perhaps the most important thing that put me back to life." In the dream:

I found myself pregnant with the child of a man other than my husband. I went to my husband and declared, "It's time for me to leave you." Christine realized in the dream that she did not want to go to another man; it was clear to her that what she wanted was to leave the kind of life where she was defined by relationship. Yet, Christine thought, she did not want to raise a child by herself. She decided that the only appropriate thing to do was to have an abortion, and so, Christine remembered, "In the dream I stuck a knitting needle up my vagina and bled to death."
When Christine awoke she felt that she had not only died in the dream but had been reborn. She explained, '"The death in the dream was the death that I had needed; there was no longer any need for a literal death. The old self had died, the self that had been wedded to the patriarchy."

SOURCE: Women Dreaming-into-Art: Seven Artists who Create from Dreams, by Patricia Ariadne, (2006, Galde Press), p.11-13


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