NOT PROPERLY DRESSED.
I was sitting in the tent, just set up, wondering about our idea to drive an hour back to the city and go to some club for a party!? We'd literally just arrived in the bush and pitched our tent. My friend, who symbolically represents success in life, asked if I was ready to go and if my tights were okay after all the struggle of putting them on inside the tent. I told her confidently — yes. But then I noticed a tear near my ankle, and my legs were hairy and unshaved. Anyhow, I just thought, whatever, let’s drive.
When we arrived, I realised my shoes were left behind, in the other car's boot. And on the way to the party, we stopped at someone's flat, where I also realised I had no underwear under my tights. Some part of me thought, with humour, how sexy that was; another part just felt uncomfortable. Anyhow, I found my black lacy knickers and tried to figure out how to put them on without taking the tights off, and somehow managed.
That was just my dream. But it was fully loaded with symbolism, perfectly rehearsing a feeling I know well - not “properly dressed” = NOT PERFECT OR READY ENOUGH YET, for whatever life or my own expectations demand of me.
Still, what surprised me was how I dealt with it. Nothing really stopped me from heading to the city and the club. I figured it out, or didn't give a shit, and kept participating, kept heading toward it — torn tights, hairy legs showing through them, no shoes. Though, at least the underwear situation, I mastered that. Well done. Keep participating. Keep putting yourself out there.
Still, there was another question for me running through the whole dream: Why do we need to drive back to the city and go to a club when we have just arrived in the bush and set up a tent for camping? And maybe that is the bigger question. Why do we need everything we imagine we need for life? "City and Club" = Stuff, status, badges of competence, appearance, assets, achievements and so on.
This is what dreams like this one are, in my view: a kind of rehearsal. And this is one reason we work with dream material in art therapy. Sometimes the subconscious has already worked something out before the conscious mind has caught up, and the dream is it showing you the resolution first, in symbol, before you're able to name it in waking life. Other times it works the other way around — we rehearse something in the dream precisely so we can try it out, so that when life actually asks the same question, we're no longer afraid of it. Either way, the dream is creating a feeling and practising a response.
And what I practised, in this one, was DOING and PARTICIPATING anyway, imperfect the whole way there.
Artwork Hairy Legs of the Queen of Sheba 3 by Ana Maria Pacheco's (2001)