INTRODUCTION

Saint-Denys pioneered the study of lucid dreams, but he explored many other types. One he calls "the strangest of all, which several authors have mentioned as having been experienced by some people, while declaring that they found it really very difficult to explain. I refer to those dreams where one dreams, if one is a man, that one has become a woman, and conversely, if one is a woman, that one belongs to the male sex."

In decades of dreamwork, Saint-Denys recorded only two gender-bent dreams.

TAILOR'S APPRENTICE

I dreamt that I saw a young apprentice girl with her hair spread out and horribly mistreated by a tailor, her boss (I had read in the newspapers, the day before or the day before, a judgement revealing facts of this nature which had outraged me very much). The girl had a sledgehammer in her hand. I was irritated that she let herself be hit without defending herself; I could not come to her aid, I don't know why, and I shouted in vain for her to hit back. Suddenly I found myself as the apprentice; I struck angrily with the mallet at the forehead of the hateful man who was torturing me. I look at him bloodied and lying down. Then I feared that I would be arrested; I gathered up my hair, tied it behind my head, ran away and took care to hang my dress on the wooden hairpins on which the twisted hemp was stretched.

I was fourteen years old when I had this dream.

DAMSEL ON THE PYRE

In the second observation, of much more recent date, it is again a very painful situation that I assimilate.

I was among savages, Indians or natives, I don't know. On a pyre was tied a half-naked young woman, whose beauty further stimulated the deep feeling of pity that penetrated me. Tongues of flame were already touching her slender legs. This sight distressed me. I imagined all the anguish and tumultuous thoughts this wretched woman must have had.

The same phenomenon was repeated as before; the same transposition, unconscious in its realisation, but well characterised in its result. I believe in good faith that this woman was exposed to the torment of fire. I have personally experienced all the emotions I thought she would experience. Then, by one of those reversals of ideas so frequent in dreams, and which prove, by the way, how acute the attention in them may be, as it comes to paralyse all reflection, I was in the process of forgetting my terrible situation in the admiring contemplation of my own forms, when the feeling of truth dawned upon me, and the consciousness of such a mad delusion awoke me.

Source: Dreams and how to direct them, 2022, pp 184-185; Daniel Bernardo's translation of Les reves et les moyens de les diriger by Hervey de Saint-Denys, 1867. Untitled in original.

EDITOR'S NOTES

What a change from teen to so-called adult! The first dream's clear and active; his urge to help is effective. His identification is close and sharp-eyed--that dress is hemp (cheap and scratchy) yet she hangs it with care; this rag's all she has. But the second dream's language is stilted; I think he means "When I became her, I got so distracted by my own sexiness I forgot my little problem of getting burned alive." His urge to help backfires! Sex distracts him from effective action--even from clear narration. Struggle dwindles to... ogle.

I won't preach the gospel of Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll or Peter Pan here, but sometimes the child is better than the man. At least a 19th Century European man.

FINAL NOTE: these are early, but not the first gender-bent dreams on record. Sixteen centuries earlier, Saint Perpetua, about to be martyred, had her Last Dream.

--Chris Wayan

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