How One Dream Changed My Life Forever

The Dream Catalyst for Changing My Life

 
I dream I’m sitting in the audience of a theatrical production in Los Angeles. I don’t know what the play is about or how it’s possible the audience of strangers can laugh when I suddenly realize I’ve left a soft, round, Calico kitten outside my home in a torrential downpour.

How could I forget to bring her inside? She was my responsibility!

 
Suddenly, I find myself in my front yard, buffeted by slashing rain. I scramble on hands and knees, searching for the kitten, mud seeping between my fingers, blackening my pants, clogging my shoes. Then I see her. She’s an inert white-and-orange lump lying under a hedge. Shame and fear grab me by the throat. In slow motion, I reach for her.

Why is it taking so long? Why can’t my arms move faster?

 
Touching the kitten is the worst part. She’s still warm. Her limp body is a rebuke as I press her to my chest, trying to comfort and revive her. 

A bottle of milk appears. I try to feed the kitten as my heart beats frantically in time with the words in my head, please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die.

But, it’s too late. She’s gone. In the dream I deny my pain by replacing the kitten with a skinny, high-strung cat that looks nothing like her. It’s obvious this cat’s an imposter.

Suddenly I waken. Thank God! It was only a dream! Then why can’t I stop the tears sliding down my cheeks, or dislodge this core-deep sadness that sits on my chest like a rock?

Never mind. I’m twenty-three years old and I know everything.

 
I bury the dream with the soft, round kitten and carry on with my life as the anxious, imposter cat. At this time, I’m giving my body to a man who doesn’t love me. He lies to me, disrespects me and, although I’ve never caught him, I know he’s unfaithful.

I don’t yet understand that I am the kitten I left in the rain. That I’ve abandoned myself as I participate in an emotional-cycle-of-abuse.

My conscious mind is too busy defending my choices to listen to my dreams and intuition. It has reasoned that, post-feminism, it’s my right to have sex with whomever I choose.

After all, I’m tough, thick-skinned. I’m not weak or vulnerable when I offer my body to a man who doesn’t value me.

 
Yes, maybe he is using me, but I’m using him too. I can be just like him and stand a short distance from my body as it takes its pleasure. The dream about the kitten who died works on me, nonetheless. 

One night, when my lover kisses me, I feel repelled. As if he’s intruding into a sacred space. I determinedly ignore the feeling. Soon the discomfort becomes pleasure and then wanting. But, why does it feel like I’m hurting myself?

That night, as I sleep beside this man, I dream we’re making love. A part of me detaches from the tryst on the bed and floats above our bodies, watching.

This detached part of me notices that my most sensitive, intimate female part has become a fragile, beautiful flower that my lover is heedlessly destroying.

The scene no longer looks romantic. It becomes clear that I’m allowing my most private self – my true self – to be violated.

The detached part of me doesn’t watch anymore. She becomes a Viking warrior who grabs the man off my body and flings him outside, slamming the door shut behind him.

Turning toward the bed, this warrior sees that the plundered woman on the bed has transformed, not into the kitten, but into a soft, round infant.

I have a second chance! I wrap the baby in a blanket and clutch her fiercely to my chest. I’m ready to protect her. I’m ready to be an adult. I’m ready to love this child before any person or compulsion.

As I waken, I want to remember this feeling, have it tattooed on the sacred vessel that is my body, because it is the unmitigated truth that vibrates eternally at the core of my being, if only I’m willing to own and defend it.

That night, I’m in the audience of a theatrical production in Los Angeles. This time it isn’t a dream. It’s real. It’s a one-act play I’ve written called, But That Wasn’t Sex.

A character I’ve created named Jean takes center stage under a spotlight. She speaks the words I’ve written and didn’t understand at the time I wrote them. It’s as if the character, and my wise unconscious brain, is speaking the words directly to me. Jean says:

“No matter what has happened to me, Love is unbroken, like Truth. It exists on a continuum which I ride above. And when I can peer into the deep mirror that is my soul, reach my hands down into the Love and bring the nectar of it to my lips to drink, I nourish myself, I nourish the child within me, I nourish the world. Drink mother, sister, woman, child. Drink the Love.”

That dream was a catalyst for profound change. And because of it, I now have two feisty, beautiful, well-loved daughters with the man I’ve been married to for sixteen years.

He lovingly parents our girls, showing them what it is to be valued. And he husbands me. Which means he not only loves, supports, respects and protects me, but also inspires me to be a whole person every single day.

All of this, because I listened to my dream.