Declaring Independence
Dreamed by Patricia Garfield c.1946, Fiona c.1951, Lenore c.1958 & Helen c.1962, as told by Garfield
INTRODUCTION
The monumental issue of teenage years--independence--becomes a dramatic theme in dream content.
Dreams in which the girl's mother is metamorphosed into an animal, or ones in which the beast is revealed to be the mother express the young girl's fear of this powerful figure in her life and her sense of potential destructiveness. Yearning to be autonomous, the girl is still nonetheless dependent upon her mother's goodwill to provide for most of her needs. Money, clothing, food, transportation, parties, overnight guests--such attributes of a teenage girl's life are affected by her mother's mood and willingness to be cooperative, as well as her mother's resources. Under the best of circumstances, the adolescent daughter and her mother will clash from time to time. Under the worst, the tension between them is unbearable.
To become herself, the teen must separate from her parents. She must act on her own initiative and learn to make her way in the world. Her identity is hewn by chopping herself free if she has an overwhelming, octopus-armed mother. If this independence is not achieved, the girl may turn into an adult who still struggles to define who she is and what her own viewpoint is, as distinct from that of her mother. She will confuse herself and her mother as one, rather than each being a person with their own flaws and their own powers.
The young woman's mother is frequently disguised in dreams, as mine was in the doll named Mary.
1: CRUEL DOLL
Patricia Garfield c.1946
During early puberty I dreamed that my favorite doll, named Mary, had become mean to me; I feared and hated her. No longer able to enjoy playing with her after this dream, I exiled her to the attic. Eventually, I came upon her again, her face crackled and her joints creaky; I discarded her entirely.
Then I did not think of the symbolism involved, that Mary was the name of the Mother of Jesus, and how I felt increasingly hostile toward my own mother as I strove to be myself, not what she wanted me to be.
2: WOLF-MOTHER
Fiona c.1951
Fiona, now in her forties, remembers being terrified as a young girl by a dream about two wolves. They menaced her and she was at their mercy. At some point in the dream:
The creatures take off their masks. I am horrified to see that it is my mother and my aunt (who lived with us) underneath. It really frightens me.Fiona's nightmare let her peep under the mask of her dream creatures to the authority figures they symbolized. Although she felt loving toward them while awake, her dream suggests that these women seemed to her dreaming mind to be domineering, attacking, and hurtful. She explained, "It was as though the people I loved and trusted weren't real. They didn't exist and it was always the wolves."
Dreams exaggerate. They take an emotional truth and dramatize it. Enlarged, the dream can be terrifying; the emotion it expresses is real, but not usually so life-threatening as it feels in the dream. Fiona was saying to herself in dream language, "It's as if my mother and my aunt were wolves who are hounding me." The dream picture is a metaphor.
3: VAMPIRE-MOTHER
Lenore c.1958
Sharp-toothed creatures in dreams usually indicate the presence of anger--in the dreamer herself or in the person the dream animal symbolizes. Lenore, too, at a young age, visualized her mother as a beast of prey. Toward the end of a frightening dream:
I seem to wake up in my bed. My mother comes into my room. I am happy to see her, thinking now I'll be safe. She comes over to the corner of the carpet on the foor and gets down on her hands and knees to examine the corner. She looks up at me and smiles-she has fangs like a vampire! I am really scared. I actually wake up.Lenore, in her thirties now, regards this nightmare as her worst. It was impossible to shake off the notion that her mother was evil and intended her harm. Lenore's mother did seem to have mixed feelings toward her daughter, an ambivalence that was sensed by the child. Although Lenore felt she loved her mother, she did not completely trust her. She felt it was "draining" to be with her, that it "sucked something out of me." Small wonder the little girl cast her mother in the part of a vampire.
4: OCTOPUS-MOTHER
Helen, c.1962
Helen, also in her thirties, expressed her mother's all-consuming, smothering aspect, along with her anger, in a dream she had at about ten or eleven years old:
I am standing in the doorway of my house and some boys want me to come out and play--probably baseball (I was the pitcher on the boys' team until I was twelve.) My mother appears from a stairway behind me and blocks the doorway.Helen thinks this dream probably represented her emerging sexuality and her mother's efforts to "block" her developing relationship with boys. The all-embracing, smothering quality of the dream octopus made it more difficult for Helen to relate to her mother in waking life.She turns into an octopus of the same size as herself, black, with a line for a mouth and eight arms, like a devouring Kali (the black goddess of destruction in Indian mythology). Either I knew or she said, "You cannot go out and play!" With one of her arms she slapped me as hard as she could, and I fell backward and woke up.
SOURCE: Women's Bodies, Women's Dreams by Patricia Garfield, 1988, pp.67-68
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