This was a long dream about a voyage on a boat. Toward the end of the dream, it was time to disembark.

I had found what seemed to be some lost clothes. From the deck I said to the captain above in his cabin that I had found these clothes that someone had left behind. To my surprise, he told me. "Oh no, they are yours." I tried on the skirt, which fit perfectly.

Then I put on the full-length white wool coat, which I also had found. As I began to button the buttons that went from the mandarin collar to the floor, I had a very powerful memory flash. I realized [in the dream] that this coat had been made for me by my servants in another life.

I saw an image of myself in orange brocade robes beside an Eastern or Near Eastern temple. I had once been a princess of a small principality who wanted very much to perform the most sacred rites at the temple but could not, for tradition had ruled that only men could do this. I therefore had ordered this long and very heavy coat, a copy of the "altar boy' garb, to camouflage my femininity so that I might at last enter the temple unnoticed and come as close to God as the men.

As I stood on the boat remembering all this, I couldn't believe that such a fantasy was a past life memory since I didn't believe in reincarnation.

But the magnificent coat did fit.

This might not be a reincarnational dream at all, but it does hint at what I finally realized to be at the heart of my resentment at being a woman in our society: it has always been reserved to men to perform the most sacred rites. Access to the greatest sources of power has been through men's clubs in both the sacred and secular areas.

This dream clarified a lot of the feelings about male chauvinism that I had been experiencing at the time. It helped me to let go of some of my resentments as I realized that the society has a great, but not unlimited, power over my life or my potential.

Looking back on this dream now fifteen years later I chuckle to read that, like most people, my "past life" image portrays me as a princess, albeit of a tiny country. One rarely hears of past life images of glass blowers, sailors, peasants, weavers.

Two things strike me about this dream, which I dreamed while studying in Zürich at the Jung Institute and while I was in Jungian analysis. The exotic imagery was typical of my dream life during that period of intense study of Jung's work and of mythology. In my practice as teacher of dream skills to people from varied theoretical backgrounds, I have seen again and again that the old saying "Jungians dream Jungian dreams, Freudians dream Freudian dreams, Adlerians dream Adlerian dreams," has some truth to it. We do tend to dream in images taken from our reading and our theoretical belief systems.

But I would suggest thit we use the images popular in a particular system because we are thinking in those terms and that we adapt their meaning to our own needs. A problem arises only when an analyst from a particular school assumes that familiar images mean what his or her reading, training, and opinions suggest and thereby fails to help the dreamer explore the dreamer's idiosyncratic understanding and use of the images.

If we look past my tendency to dream in exotic images that comes with having been a Jungian student, another level of "The Temple Coat" dream becomes apparent. The dream came to me soon after I graduated from Princeton University in 1972, a member of only the second graduating class that included women.

The delight of gaining entrance to a formerly male bastion had been a long-standing theme in my life. My father and uncle went to Princeton; I had been attending their reunions (which are annual, elaborate, four-day campus parties) since the age of nine. In l968 I suggested to a Yale undergraduate that we organize a coed trial week at Yale. The following autumn both Yale and Princeton admitted women. Since a part of me really believed that Princeton's motto, "Dei sub nomine viget" could be loosely translated as "God went to Princeton" the connection to a sacred setting becomes clear.

SOURCE: Living Your Dreams by Gayle Delaney (1996 ed) p.234-6