I have worked with... many women whose dreams confront them with the... often unwanted insight that... their current relationships [echo] their early relationship to their fathers... I could fill several books with their moving stories. These women are all very bright and usually well read in psychology. The dismay they feel in discovering that they have chosen men according to their unfulfilled needs and early imprinting on Daddy is outdone only by their surprise that this had actually happened to them, not just to other, less aware, women.

I have chosen two of Marianna's dreams because they eloquently express the force of what I have called Daddy's Curse, the spell under which most women live until they recognize their automatic, preprogrammed responses to men. Marianna is an artist of unusual intelligence whose father was a charismatic, extremely powerful captain of industry. At the time of the dream, she was living with a man named Dean who was insisting on a sexually open relationship. She described him as a brilliant, arrogant man who would not compromise ever, and who suffered painful feelings of inferiority from a terrible childhood.

Marianna described the king in the following dream as a person with the ultimate power to decide the nature of her life. She bridged his strength and possessiveness to her father, who was so powerful in his career and at home. In the dream she plays the role of the queen, as to some extent she did in her family, her mother having been an alcoholic. Here is her first dream.

And I wonder if a whole man could perhaps sneak in--No, his beard and his erection would give him away. But I think to myself that I will write the story so that he does--and I think the queen will fall in love with him--but the king may kill him.

As we proceeded with the interview, Marianna bridged the king not only to her father but to her boyfriend, Dean, who was extraordinarily charismatic and whom she greatly admired. But as Marianna continued her description, we heard that Dean was also extremely egotistical and fundamentally insecure. He thought of himself as a sort of wise man who should naturally have several adoring, sexually available women in his life at any one time. Marianna, who was entranced by Dean's (and her father's) charisma, was also his prisoner. She was not free to be with a whole man. She was the obedient girl-queen-groupie to a very insecure king. Her next dream developed this theme:

The army is retreating, they are going home. The Queen is encamped in her silken tent. The courtier comes to her. He wants to make love. Passively, she consents. He begins touching her eagerly, and at first it is mildly erotic, then she loses all interest. He seems clumsy and crude. She cannot kiss him back. She realizes this is not what she wants to do, and she stops him.

Marianna saw the queen as her erotic self, who only seemed to be in charge but who was really at the mercy of certain men in her life. The stone-walled bedroom seemed to her like a fortress that both protected and imprisoned her. She described the role of a courtier as that of waiting on the queen, and said that they are generally noble in their own right. She bridged the most highly placed courtier to her boyfriend, Dean. In the dream, the queen is far from her own kingdom, where she would be secure, just as Marianna felt somewhat uprooted in her current life situation. Her dream realization that her courtier held more power than she reflected the uncomfortable imbalance of power that existed between her and Dean, and she wondered if the prison-like windows were hinting that she felt somewhat a prisoner with Dean.

Then when she described Napoleon as a tremendously powerful general who had a huge ego and who tried to conquer the world, she realized that Napoleon perfectly characterized her father--and to a lesser extent Dean.

Her personal power was indeed being decimated by her dependence on the boyfriend/courtier, and especially by the war she was waging against her father in her intense determination to live a counterculture life in stark contrast to her father's very conservative style.

She had thought Dean would be part of her escape from her father's world, but via the dream she had begun to see that she had recreated some of the same dynamics of submission to her new-age boyfriend as she had experienced with her Napoleonic father.

After she loses the war she sees the courtier as clumsy and crude, and this she describes as another side of Dean, which becomes clearer as she recognizes that Dean will not save her and that her battle is with her dad and the other Napoleons in her world...

This in-depth analysis of sexual relationships, including their historical roots, is what makes dreams so tremendously valuable in breaking Daddy's Curse--or Mother's Spell.

SOURCE: Sexual Dreams by Gayle Delaney (1994 ed) pp. 146-149