THAT DAY

I have nonspecific pelvic inflammation--a little-known, puzzling, elusive illness, and very rare among men. Since my doctors have been no help, I've been trying to figure out what causes it. I ask my dreams' opinion.

THAT NIGHT

I'm with some friends of mine from Psychodrama--intense actor types, from moody to downright crazy. Fascinating but strange. One of them, Dan, has built a bomb shelter; he's stockpiling for World War Three. He asks "What would you stockpile? What do you value?"

Sexy Lucinda, sprawled in a wood-framed slat chair, says "Uh... clean paper? I bet it'll be valuable, after the world ends. And if not, I can always use it myself--I'm a writer."

What do I value? Well... watching Lucinda! Fascinated by her legs, which are visually sliced into strips by the wooden slats of her chair. I slowly piece together those parts and find what I thought were tan tights are bare skin: she's naked. I crane my neck and examine her cunt. It's floating, disconnected by slats, making my gawking strangely impersonal. She doesn't seem to mind if I study her.

Suddenly I realize what I'm really noticing is how the tendons and muscles of her inner thighs insert into her pelvis! What I want to stockpile for the apocalypse isn't Lucinda, or sex, or voyeurism, but the knowledge of anatomy.

I'm grateful for Dan's question--and Lucinda's chair. Without their slicing, I'd never have got past my feminist shame and just observed. I'd have felt I was drooling over Lucinda, and looked away embarrassed.

And I need to look close, learn the muscles and tissues, see how other people move and hold tension... and then take stock of my pelvis to figure out what's really going on. Quit assuming it's sexual, or psychosomatic... quit assuming anything.

And then I wake. Answered, yet with more questions than when I fell asleep.

But, now, the right questions.

YEARS LATER

Despite the dream, I didn't quit assuming absolutely anything--I still trusted experts. My doctors had told me, after supposedly thorough allergy testing, that I reacted to dust & dozens of pollens & animal danders, but not to any foods. They said it must be "stress"--that wonderfully vague word--and recommended therapy. So I spent over a decade in pain, testing every other hypothesis I could frame. At last in desperation I retested foods myself--fasted, then added just one food a day for months--testing every ingredient separately. Slat by slat, so to speak.

My pelvic inflammation vanished--until I resumed wheat, oats, or barley. I reacted violently to each. Retested--same thing. Long as I avoided these three grains, no pain. I was severely and provably food-sensitive.

The lesson for dreamworkers? I got the basic warning that I needed to look close, but assumed that Lucinda's nudity meant my illness was likely sexual--psychosomatic. But would I have jumped to that conclusion and wasted years if Freud had never written? He dismissed female clients' tales of sexual abuse, and labeled pelvic pain hysterical, neurotic, symbolic. In a word, he psychologized. His irresponsible theorizing warped whole generations--including mine. My doctors weren't the only blind ones; I psychologized too. Don't! Consider literal and shamanic readings. Step out of Freud's shadow, and the dream says plainly "it's a survival matter for you to look over your pelvic pain methodically and analytically. Piece by piece." (It's anti-Jung too. Rather than arguing for holism, the dream urges analysis and step-by-step logic!)

The broader lesson about experts is obvious, if cynical. How did that Cold War thug Henry Kissinger put it? "Trust, but verify."

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