BEFORE BED

Ten years ago, even five, sex for me often led to pain--pelvic pain lasting 2-3 days. But in the last few years I've gotten better. Am I well enough risk dating?

So just before sleep, I incubate a dream, asking "Is sex the issue I need to work on now? And if so, how?"

THAT NIGHT...

I meet a girl I'm attracted to, a redhead with that odd saurian face some have--strong cheekbones and temples, heavy-lidded lazy lizard eyes. I hover awkwardly. She's not too interested in me, but I persist--keep talking with her--and finally, she starts to be intrigued! "Perseverance furthers"?

We go to the beach together and swim. After, we lie on a towel and I stroke her...

... and she starts to change into her other form. She keeps her red hair and saurian face, but changes her body to match... she becomes a huge lamia or naga, scaly but humanoid up top, sea-serpent below. Her scales are brilliant in the beach sun. So beautiful...

I don't mind the change: as she coils round me, I think "she's a better lover in some ways as a sea serpent--she can touch me everywhere at once!" I writhe and squirm--heated by the sun, she's not cold, not at all! Soon, I come and come.

She's very turned on, but can't come--she feels a bit faint even queasy... why? Dehydration, overheating? Exercising too long up here on the hot sand, not in the cool sea? When I feel her forehead, she does seem feverish. She says only "I feel kinda... landsick."

I do have a beach umbrella, so I shade her as she collects herself into human form, and, leaning on me, wobbles down to the water's edge, wades in... and slips under.

Sigh! I didn't mean for that to happen.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Persistence: While ill, I gave up or didn't try, because sex hurt. Girls I really liked quite naturally misread my caution as indifference.
• Scaly lover: on a list of science fiction golden oldies, I saw Rosel Brown's Sybil Sue Blue. Sybil has sex on the beach with a scaly guy from Alpha Centauri.
• Reptilian red head, illness instead of orgasms: on "Who's The Boss?" a repressed blonde just can't face sex--so when a guy comes to ask her out, she says no, then drinks. Too much. Her mom the redhead steals her daughter's date and screws him. Sleazy? Better sleaze than cirrhosis.
• Sea-creature overheats: is it stressful for my anima to be too present, is being under waking scrutiny just too intense? Just not her world.
• Possible dehydration: what if it's physical? The dream may be hinting "to prevent pelvic pains, just drink a lot of water."
• Answer to incubation: Yes, I can tackle sex now--but cautiously. I'm still fragile. So don't get... overheated.
• ACTION 1: Persistence! I have to overcome brutal Pavlovian training that made me timid. Unintentionally, I HIDE that I care. Show it!
• ACTION 2: Drink extra water, avoid booze, notice my... temperature? Emotional or otherwise.

THREE DAYS LATER

I have an epic, surreal, sexy dream with more animal people--two fox-headed farm girls. See Dopp.

NEXT DAY, 1988/11/5

I visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and stumble on a solo show by Susan Marie Dopp. I'm shocked to find images from last night's dreams on the wall. The parallels are so vivid my journal barely mentions another Dopp painting of a sexy "mermaid-snake-girl"--a lamia! Was I already anticipating the show four nights earlier? But the immediacy of last night's dream, seen on the museum walls, distracts me--I don't even make a connection with the earlier dream.

YEARS LATER: 2021/9/13

I'm transcribing these old dream journals. Eight months further back in my journal (1988/2/25) I just found a forgotten entry on Night Life by Liam Hudson, a book on dreams. Hudson discusses recurring snake-nightmares by John Ruskin, culminating in a snake-woman dream:

On 1 November 1869, he records:
'the most horrible serpent dream I ever had yet in my life. The deadliest came out into the room under a door. It rose up like a Cobra--with horrible round eyes and had woman's, or at least Medusa's, breasts. It was coming after me... but I got some pieces of marble off a table and threw at at, and that cowed it and it went back; but another small one fastened on my neck like a leech, and nothing would pull it off.'

Source: Night Life p. 118. Hudson's source, Rosenberg's The Darkening Glass, p.169, has the same elision, so I can't say how much this quote omits. --Wayan

Clearly my dream recalled this--lamias as a handy symbol for irreconcilable sexual conflict. Yet my dream almost mockingly upends it--a happy dream not a nightmare, a friendly snake-woman, unconflicted sex. Instead we have irreconcilable... thermal conflict? Hydration, luminosity, exposure conflict?

Too bad my so-called conscious, eight months along, had apparently forgotten Night Life. My notes next morning don't even mention Ruskin's dream. Whether the dream looked four days ahead or eight months back--or both--I just couldn't spot such echoes (chance or not) across time, not with a paper journal. Now, on disk, my journal's searchable, and I've found whole chains of anticipatory dreams I recognized only long after, like these annual gun-nightmares before a shooting I earwitnessed: Fetal Pause, A Date in Minsk, and Monkey with a Gun.

WHAT HAPPENED LONGTERM?

I cured myself--it was severe gluten intolerance my doctors missed. But even today, pain-free, I need solitude, just as the Lamia needs a lot of time in cool water. I think that was the core message here. I'm a creature of the dream-deeps, and too much time--even fun time--out in the heat of your daylight world, and I get sick. Not neurosis--genetic! I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome--I'm vulnerable to heatstroke and dehydration--our bloodpressure rises & falls to the point of vertigo or even fainting--but also, we're often Aspies, high-functioning autistics, with acute senses and high intelligence but easily overwhelmed and exhausted by socializing.

The sun of your regard is just too hot.

DRAWING THE LAMIA

That same week of September 2021, I went to my friend Catshall's art salon and drew this dream in pencil, at last. Just 33 years late!

As I finished, two friends discussed an art show they'd seen in San Francisco--collage and sculptures by Wangechi Mutu. The sculptures had really riled them up! I asked what they looked like.

One artist said "wait a minute..." and fished through her collage supplies--magazine clippings--and handed me this photo from the show.

No synchronicity here.

Water Woman, Wangechi Mutu, bronze, 2017

IMPLICATIONS FOR DREAMWORK

This dream thumbs its nose at several dream-theories:

1. "Dreams mean nothing--they're just your brain doing housekeeping." If that were true, dream incubation would fail. Here, I asked about sex, and got a sexual dream. Was it chance? Not that year! For six months before or after this, I had zero orgasmic sex dreams. A whole year with just one--the night I asked about sex. That's not memory consolidation, exploring associations, or chance. It's intelligent response.
2. Freud felt dreams vented taboo feelings, often disguised. If Freud were right, our sex-on-the-beach might be frustrated--our moms might show up to nag us, or cops might arrest us. Or the Lamia might devour me or crush me or even offer me a Biblical apple--depending on my hidden feelings about women. Instead, sex is guiltless and unconflicted; the dream points at a medical not a psychological issue. Sure, shamans claimed for 15,000 years that dreams were diagnostic, but they're just a buncha savages without lab coats or cigars.
3. Jung? The central character is a myth--by whatever name--lamia, naga, mermaid, seaserpent--but she seems a long way from Jung's timeless archetypes. Even the plot (and mood) are wrong. Not numinous--just humorous. "Ooh, I feel landsick..." Forget the Alchemical Wedding, and drink more water!
4. The least bad fit is the multistage eclecticism pioneered by sleep researcher Ann Faraday in Dream Power and especially The Dream Game, echoed in recent years by Marc Ian Barasch in Healing Dreams. In short: assume a dream's problem-solving, and may explore multiple possibilities. First try a naïve reading--some dreams are literal!--but if that goes clunk, try metaphoric & symbolic readings, and if that leaves you flat, go mythic/Jungian, or try bad puns, or ESP, or anything. A dream can say several things at once. Just never buy the claim that an intense, coherent dream answering a question is just your brain doing laundry. No. Just... no.

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