INTRODUCTION

This long piece shows Gayle Delaney's dreamwork technique in detail, with all its hesitancies and warts, as she incubates a dream deliberately, then slowly figures out its message. Skim if you have to, but read the beginning and end at least--for the dream, though undramatic, really was life-transforming... once interpreted. And acted on.

--Chris Wayan

August 21, 1972
Zurich

Day Notes. A peaceful, quiet day. Wrote a letter to Lynn [my oldest and best friend]. I am sick of being a second-class friend to her. Whenever she has a boyfriend, she drops everything and treats me as a second-class citizen. She seems to drop everything she's doing when she has the alternative of being with even a mediocre male. Walked in the park by Zurich Lake. Read Rossi's book Dreams and the Growth of Personality. It is great. It started me thinking of the shy child who has been showing up in my dreams lately. I have lost some of my self-confidence lately. When in my life have I felt most confident? When I was skating every day, training for competitions. It's been five years since I've done any serious skating. Rossi writes that new growth in the personality seems to manifest itself first in dreams, in the form of new and unusual dream images.

Discussion. I need and want some new awareness, some new growth in my personality to break through old habits of perception and reaction to the world. I know there is within me more creative energy than I am using, but how to let it out?

How can I release and express my deepest, most energetic creativity?

Dream: I had sent some photos to Philadelphia so that the passport people could choose the appropriate one when making up my new passport. I received my new passport in the mail and opened it to examine it. Instead of just one picture, the first four pages were filled with color pictures of myself ice-skating. Fabulous pictures I seemed to be seeing for the first time. I thought: "I didn't know I was that good after so long away from serious skating. Could I be that good?"

Many pictures were vivid action shots. In one particularly my body was just right, perfect balance and form. It was exciting to see. In another picture I was about forty-five. I reached into it and examined the muscle tone of my leg. I was amazed that it was good enough for exhibition skating at that age. But this is a passport, and four pages of myself is really excessive and far too intimate and revealing. On the last page of pictures, I find my actual (present) passport picture. It is in the usual black-and-white, pleasant, calm, standard. While this should be the only picture in the passport, it was just one, an insignificantly placed one, among many. "But this can't be," thought I. "It looks as if I'm trying to show off. Why did the passport makers do it? What shall I do?"

Then Lynn tells me she just received her passport with one page or so of extra pictures. Her father, a lawyer, had chemically steamed off the extra pictures. He did it very carefully so the police would not detect his tampering with the document. "My father will do it to your passport if you like," said Lynn. At first I was relieved. Then I hesitated, not wanting to tamper with my passport, for it is written on the passport itself that any alterations discovered will result in the revocation of the passport.

Fully awake, I realize the impossibility of it all. I've not skated seriously for too long. I've lost too much time. I'm already twenty-three years old. Even if I were to give it another try, give up school for ice-skating, where would I find a partner? There are so few men to choose from in ice-dancing. As in the dream, I'd like to believe it possible that I could have a career in exhibition and movie ice-skating, but I cannot. The dream was so vivid, and seemed so real in a literal sense, that it is hard to see behind the metaphor. The literal-objective interpretation can't be right, so I'll try a dream interview to get to the bottom of this.

Setting. It is time for a new passport (identity). I've given the passport people a variety of self-images from which to choose the one showing the truest likeness of my identity. The passport I receive is new. The dream is surely dealing with my incubation request for new awareness of myself, and perhaps with a way to express it.

What is a passport? My favorite document. It shows one's identity and permits free access to the world. Free movement. Horrible to lose it or have it revoked. You can't see the world without it.

The color photos? These represent my dream's idea of my true identity. It seems that I see them for the first time in the dream, or that I have been unaware of this self-image until now. These pictures showed me skating with and without a partner, in professional rather than competitive (amateur) settings, such as ice shows and movies.

The photos showed me at different ages ranging from twenty-five or so to forty-five. I was terribly pleased to see them but did not dare let myself believe they represented my true identity. Yet the photos were undeniably of me; I could even touch my future self-images as if they were three-dimensional and real.

Philadelphia: Why would I send these off to the Philadelphia passport office, rather than the one I usually use in New York? Because Philadelphia is a more sensitive place, more aware of beauty and graceful living, than New York, which is so work oriented and pressured. I have been identifying myself with New York since I quit skating, haven't I?

How does that relate to my life? Perhaps in that I have become rather too sedate lately, in an effort to be acceptable to the intellectuals I have been surrounded by. I've somewhat repressed my flamboyance and the more free-spirited aspects of my personality because they don't seem socially acceptable in academic and professional environments. I regret this, but it seems appropriate. Perhaps I could find some outlets for my more outrageous, flamboyant characteristics. Perhaps a little skating on the side, a few times a week, would do it. Yet the dream is making a special point that my skating self is the greater, more significant part of my personality.

Who is Lynn? A good friend who is too man-oriented. This has hurt me, as well as her own career. She puts herself down a lot and doesn't realize that she is dynamite as a woman, as a dancer-actor, and as a law student.

Is there a Lynn in me? I know the dream is telling me there is, but I can't believe it. Do I have more talent and "pizazz" than I realize or have the courage to express? A little maybe. Am I too man oriented? Yes.

Summary. OK. The dream is saying that my most colorful, lively, and true identity is represented by the skating pictures, and that the sedate, hardworking, nonadventurous aspects of myself, with which I now almost totally identify, belong, as does the black-and-white photo, in a subordinate position to my skating self. Just like Lynn, I tend to reject my skating self because of self-doubt, and because of an exaggerated concern for appearing respectable to people in my profession as well as to the part of myself that is like Lynn's father. As Rossi would say, Lynn's father represents my work and security-oriented attitudes, which block my realization of my true identity. These attitudes limit my personality and tend to standardize it. It is no wonder that, when I looked at myself through Lynn and her father's eyes, I felt inadequate and incapable of becoming that skater. I couldn't see the part of myself that is already like her.

Perhaps I am being like Lynn now, but becoming a professional ice-skater does seem to be out of the question. Therefore, I shall interpret the dream to mean that I need to recognize, accept, and actualize the symbolic ice-skater within me--if I dare.

This dream was a harbinger of such good news on the objective level that I was tempted to place it in the category of a wish-fulfillment dream. Yet as usually happens in the course of a dream interview, it soon became clear that on the subjective level the meaning of the dream was more profound than that. Unhappily, I found both the objective interpretation (that I would skate professionally) and the subjective interpretation (that I was rejecting my flamboyant self) threatening to my current self-image and to my current professional and romantic involvements.

Even after rny dream interview, I decided to ignore the dream.

Finally, of course, waking and dream events conspired to convince me to take the message of this dream seriously.

About a year after the dream, I began to express more and more of the symbolic skater within. Two years after the dream I put my skates on again and went to a local skating club session.

There, miracle of miracles, I met Bob Castle, a spectacular gold-medalist ice-dancer who just happened to be looking for a partner! Male ice-dancers are rare, but ones with gold medals and no partner are harder to find than water in the desert.

Since Bob and I have been skating together, we have been to ice rinks in Sun Valley and Europe, and my skating is better and more fun than ever before. I never would have believed this possible in 1972. I have not turned professional, but who knows? Even that might be in the cards for me, though I still doubt it.

Be that as it may, the quality of my life has improved markedly. Much more of the skater within has moved into every area of my life, and I have recaptured that sense of adventure, the longing for which had prompted me to incubate the passport dream.