I dream I'm sculpting a life-size clay figure of a dancer who's lying on the ground, sprawled, relaxed.

I try sprawling beside it, myself, to see what poses feel best inside my own bones.

At last she says "I've been reading Nancy Friday. She says masturbation is vital for girls, they need to be encouraged. We may not even recognize our sexual feelings as sex, until we're familiar with our own responses. So make your sculpture touch herself, and love it."

I try shifting one hand of the figure from her hip to her cunt. And her new pose works! Dawn's right.

She looks beautiful, sexy... happy.

IN THE MORNING

Prompted by the dream, I reread Nancy Friday on masturbation. Dawn in the dream was right. Friday does say girls need more explicit teaching and encouragement to masturbate. Boys learn to recognize their sexual responses faster, since an erection's so hard to miss.

So why'd I have that dream? Because I missed it! As a boy at age 9-10 certain cartoon characters seemed sexy to me: Archy's Betty & Veronica in bikinis, but especially the girls in Steve Canyon in those Asian skirts with slit thighs--so glamorous! But rather than imagine sex with them, I wanted to be them. I tried to make such outfits out of cloth and model them. When I did that, imagined I could be a Dragon Lady or Poteet the girl pilot, I got my first erections, and didn't know what they were. Penis in the way! Wished it were gone.

I habitually talk as if my gender dysphoria came from my mom's values, or from growing up surrounded by brilliant girls--my gifted sisters and cousins and their friends. But now I wonder. From day one, my sexuality grew from a female self-image. I longed to be sexy and beautiful--and that to me meant to be a girl. My erection was a mildly puzzling, annoying intrusion into my sexy reveries. It took months before I even saw erections as sexual excitement, let alone tried to masturbate. And like many girls, I didn't use my hands. Pillows, or I'd put my forearms together to form a sort of vagina. I never centered on my own body--always imagined being with a girl, being a girl, or, usually, both.

I wonder if those comfortable sculpture-poses in the dream meant I'm finally accepting the roles and stances that are natural for me in relationships--femme roles, femme stances.

ACTION: Sculpt this for real! And when I date, don't put on a butch mask. I'm femme, and girls I date need to know that up front. For us to work out, they need to like a girl in a boy's body.

YEARS LATER

Well... that dream nagged me quietly all through school in 1999-2000, through building the World Dream Bank in 2000-1, through starting our band, the Krelkins, and building a dozen alien worlds (Planetocopia ), 2001-3...

Then one day in 2003, my friend Patagia the poet gave me a toy kangaroo with a wire armature and bendable plastic limbs, saying "You could build a furry statue around this."

True, and I even knew which one. I made this strange undersea sketch...

I let both the sketch and the armature just stand there a year or two, while I went off to do an art show (and have a bizarre dream-epiphany) at Burning Man and struggled through a major illness, 2004-5...

But at last, one hot summer day, I snipped and trimmed and added papier-mache around it... and roughed in this dream-sculpture of a catgirl masturbating, relaxed. As close to the image in the dream as I could, after so long.

THREE MORE YEARS

And then I let it sit unphotographed three MORE years, as I slowly recovered, returned to school, got a degree, fell in love, out of love, and in love... (and I was SO slow to see my attraction wasn't just friendship, that both those lovers thought I was teasing or torturing them--when I was blind to the obvious. Just as I had been to Dawn, who I adored...)

And now, ten years later, at last, at last, at LAST, I'm getting serious about my dream-art (crude or not), and finishing things, and being... obvious.

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