My clients who are artists or who surround themselves daily with art or music seem to report more dreams of beauty than do those who do not recognize or attend to their minimum daily requirements for aesthetic experiences. (Yes, I do believe that for optimal well-being we do have an MDR for both vitamins and beauty.) Even when the artist or art lover is suffering conflict and pain, dreams of beauty now and then grace the interior landscape. And even many of their unpleasant dreams include images of compelling beauty.

Here is an amazing dream in which Victoria, a musician, used the image of a pleasurable sexual encounter with her extraordinarily creative brother to evoke a thundering delight in her own creativity and her sexuality.

Victoria had this dream after a week-long intensive master class in piano and just before she was to begin a performance tour. She described this as "the monumental dream of my life. The first in which I remember becoming fully orgasmic."

I shall place in parentheses key descriptions from her interpretation that will help you understand as you read along.

--Gayle Delaney

I am to meet my brother, Michael (a creative genius I have envied and struggled with, my creative self) and Dad (strict, rigid) at some airport. I'm riding a train, uncertain about how to handle a hamper full of stuff that I'm dragging around with me (my old emotional baggage of resentments and jealousy of my brother, of my artistic insecurities in the face of my dad). In the dream I realize that I should just leave this stuff behind.

Suddenly I am in the narrow hallway of my birth home's second floor. I walk into Michael's room and there is Ben (sweet, supportive, playful, but not sexually attractive husband), celebrating the completion of his dissertation. Michael's bed is a table upon which are arranged many flowers, vases with flowers. It is an altar to beauty in its many stages. One vase has blooms closed, opening, opened, dropping. Another, irises on a gladiolis-like stalk--color of pastel purple/blue (Michael knows a lot about beauty and creation).

There are also deep and light pink flowers arranged on the table. It takes several sightings for me to notice that large, scoop-petals are arranged around some centrally located object. Then I notice the clutter on the floor--bags and books and empty/full makeup containers and clothes and dust jackets--all of this is a sharp contrast to the ordered and disordered beauty on the table, where each element is surrounded by clear space. (The clutter of my life that leads me to vege out rather than to design and create.)

I think the book is The Unseen Real [Peter Redgrove's The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real], although the dust cover says something else. (Like the book, I am about the black goddess and the reclaiming of the senses, even if my facade has camouflaged my reality.) I settle down into my armchair to read until I'm interrupted by someone's return.

For a moment I am confused as to whether it is Ben or Michael. I was expecting Ben, but it is Michael, decked out in new clothes, safari style. The colors are all greens: leather coat, khaki shirt, dark pants. He is jaunty, strutting. He walks around the table to give me a closer look at his duds. I question this drastic change in his style from quiet to explorer, very, very sexy and outdoorsy. (My own style is changing in the same directions.)

Green Man has left. Ma, Dad, others make noise entering. I am intoxicated and frantic to clean up Michael's room. Ma has come upstairs to see what I'm doing. I rush out of the room to greet her, am obviously in an altered state. Feel myself talking loud as if in attempt to "be normal" through this atmosphere of headiness surrounding me. (In the last year, I've begun to worry less about seeming normal, I want to be free to be really different.)

I meet Ma mid-stairs, turn her around, talk to Dad. They introduce me to a white man with droopy eyes who is working with a company I don't trust. (Mainstream dull guy, parents' status quo type they would like for me.) It's as though each word and movement echoes out into an atmosphere particular to me and that it takes extra effort to penetrate that atmosphere to communicate with folks not in it.

Ma follows me upstairs, is about to follow me into Michael's room when he returns and sidetracks her. He explains the strangeness--which she detects as she looks sideways at me--as a result of a creative project nearing completion. He is cheerful and effective.

He is both with and without the dense, water/air-like ambience in which I float. The atmosphere has both light and weight, as if its substance redefines myself as moving and living beyond my body. Mamma never gets closer to me than this extended self, senses it as a boundary she cannot penetrate. (This atmosphere about me has protected me from Mom's intrusions, but it's sad that she can't really know this passionate, creative part of me.)

Michael leads me into his room, where the table of beauty is now his bed and he guides me to the edge of it, in front of his full-length mirror, and says, "Let's finish you." He then proceeds to drink the melting between my thighs. So skillfully. Tongue and tooth and lip sucking, extracting, lengthening.

Without awareness of the transition, I go outside to a garden for climax. I am naked, making my way down stone stairs. It is night. The stairs and garden in the dream house are those of some gothic castle. It is indigo night.

Ma and Dad are arguing inside the castle. Ma says "Just because you were a dropped birth (meaning abandoned, unwanted) you're angry at the world." Or perhaps Dad says, "Just because I was a dropped birth you hold this against me." That past, the past. (All that anger, it's their life, not mine.)

I crouch in the dirt right below the stairs. Masturbate. Or do I? Something maintains a constant, ecstasy-producing attention on my clit and vulva. My flower is so close to the earth, both in color and distance, that it is difficult to distinguish the two. Voices to the left and behind me chant, "Ecstasy, ecstasy, ecstasy," both in gratitude and announcement.

Here, I flash in and out of dream and real time, trying to determine if I am actually masturbating. This split of attention subsides as I surrender to the orgasmic throbbing and liquid of the moment. This is completion. I awaken to my own, low murmurings of satisfaction and know for the first time that my fingers were securely folded under my ear during the entire dream. I give gratitude to ecstasy for the visitation, and I dedicate the opening to continuing creative flowering.