uhhh it's long so dream up front and all the rest of the stuffs behind the cuts
so here it is, the dream analysis paper i half assed and wished i wouldn't have because it felt so unfinished in analysis. it's definitely begging for several edits and rearrangements to produce more clarity and flow as it's quite disjointed.
"Fear of Drowning in Femininity"
When I was a little girl my father used to take my grandmother and I to the coast fairly often as it was one of my grandmother’s favorite places. We always stopped at Winchester Bay on our way when traveling down the coast. Looking out on the bay and back towards the river was a usual thing as my father relayed stories of when he was a kid or when my grandfather worked at a shingle mill in Gardner, a small town just down the river a small way. One day while we were looking out at the bay I looked down to see where the car was in relation to the edge of the pavement and saw that we were quite close. My father had taken my grandmother and I on various adventures in his car, one of them being stuck on a road with a cliff-edge something like 1,200 to 1,500 feet off the ground and in snow where we could easily plummet to our death if my father didn’t drive carefully. We made it out alive, but my father had a way of putting me on edge and in fear of my own death at such times. However, the death I always pictured was gruesome or torturous such as death by fire or slowly dying in a mangled car in a canyon where nobody could get to us or would even discover our bodies until months after we had died.
So being prone to basically daydreaming about the possibilities as to how we could die being on the edge of the parking lot, I told him that he was too close to the edge and that he should pull away from it and park the car further away. He said we’d be fine, but then turned around and I must have been as white as a ghost because he immediately moved the car. Though several times after that trip he was just as close and I didn’t say anything but was still scared. I believe my mistrust of my father’s judgments in regards to our safety, my fear of drowning which is a constant fight for life against death and my fear of being trapped in a car under water where I’m claustrophobically cloistered until my death upon asphyxiation occurs gave way to the following recurring dream.
I’m sitting in the backseat of my father’s car as he, my grandmother and I are driving to the coast. Blurs of various shades of green fill the frame that the back window creates for my view. All of a sudden we’re pulling off the main highway and into Winchester Bay. We go down the road and there’s the market on the left side where I got a soda once when we stopped there because my father and I were thirsty. And there, just a few places down that side of the street is the little restaurant which we ate at before it closed down. It’s still empty and white. This makes me sad. “Oh!” I think, and there across from the empty restaurant is that little tavern the Oasis that I didn’t realize was a bar until just a recent visit to the coast. “Wow I’m naïve, though then again it always reminded me of that Garth Brooks song ‘Low Places’ ‘cause I thought he sang ‘Oh, I got friends in Oasis’,” says my self-ridiculing inner-monologue.
We go further down the road, past the first stop sign and take a right at the second stop sign. The parking lot on our right is fairly empty for such a nice day out and the little tourist shops on our left don’t seem to be too busy either except for the little diner we often frequent when in Winchester Bay. I look back at the road and our surroundings are taking forever to get out of my window framed view. My reactionary mental noting being, “Geez Dad, could you drive any slower? I think the speed limit’s 10 so maybe you can up the gas a little.”
As we round the corner, I see the little bait shop and store on the corner. It’s yellow and brown and very old. Then I remember the time that we all camped here and came over to the store because it was all that was left open so late at night and I got handfuls of penny candies. When I look back to the front of the car we’re by the Coast Guard station and the boat launch next to it. I begin to fear that my Dad is going to go down the ramp to get a closer look at the water. My anxiety builds and I begin to grit my teeth and sit on my hands. He makes a small swoop of the steering wheel and we go past the launch instead of down its ramp. My heart stops beating so frantically and I look out the backseat window again.
I blink and now we’re on the opposite side of the Bay. I look behind me through the back window of the car and see the crab cages lined along the pavement in front of a boat dry-docked over a gravel lot. We’re creeping along the edge of the viewing lot for the Bay. There’s what feels like 2 feet but is really about 8 or 9 feet between our right front tire and the edge of the land, which slopes off into the water. I get an ominous feeling again and my heart starts to beat rapidly. I fear that we’re going to go over the edge and into the water somehow. I say to my father, “Watch out Dad you’re getting close to the edge.” He brakes and replies, “It’s ok honey, we’ve got plenty of room and Daddy won’t go over the edge. I promise,” as he turns around to look me in the eye and grab my knee to comfort and assure me. I try and believe him and so I look out the left backseat window and at the birds walking around on the lot. I calm down and see that one of them has only one leg. I think to myself, “How can he sleep with only one leg?”
Then I notice that my father has stopped the car, put it in park, applied the emergency brake and turned off the engine. We’re sitting in the car, looking out upon the Bay and the anxiety hits me again. I can’t explain it and I want to tell my father and warn him that something bad is going to happen, but they can’t hear me when I speak to them. My father and grandmother are talking with each other and the car starts to move. The emergency brake is failing and we’re slowly moving toward the slope of the lot and nearer the water. Neither see nor feel the car’s movement before we start to roll down the slope. I’m scared and scream but nothing comes out. My father tries to calm me and says that everything will be okay, but I don’t believe him.
Our front end slips into the water and then the murky color of the water begins to cover the windshield. The slight claustrophobia I have is quickly beginning to grow into full blown claustrophobia. I tell my Dad to roll down the window and swim out and that I will jump to the front and roll down my grandmother’s and help her get out with us. The next thing I know all three of us are in the water on our way to the surface. But something happens and my father starts to sink back down. My grandmother is out like a light and not responding. I’m faced with the decision of either saving the life of my grandmother and killing my father because I can’t rescue him or vice versa. I begin crying and I feel tears stream down my face even though I’m under water. I figure that it’s best to take my grandma to the surface and to the sloped shore. Since we weren’t far from the shore when we went into the water I can quickly get my grandma to safety and then I’ll go back down and save my Dad. Then I’m back in the water on my way down to get my Dad. I get down to him but I see that it’s too late and he’s already dead. Then I wake up.
The dream was recurring and each time it became more lucid and I would try and save both my grandmother and my father. I would attempt with one first and then the other and every time got the same outcome of one alive and one dead. One time the dream happened and I told my father to take my grandma because he was stronger and could save her easier than I could and that time both of them ended up dying.
The coast is a place that we often visited and felt like a second home. It was where we bonded and where we were a family. The blurred green in the window frame was all I would see on our drives to the coast growing up and the abundant amount of different shades amazed me at the beauty of nature and made me feel alive. Going to the coast was “our thing” and a sort of ritual which made me feel as though I was living life to its fullest experience.
The memories of Winchester Bay are strong in my mind as a child because they were times when I felt validated by my father. We’d gone camping and fishing and played on the beach like normal families do. I felt “different” growing up because my parents had divorced and I hadn’t seen my mother since after their divorce and my father won custody of me. Doing the things that normal families do made me feel more normal. The part about my father and I being thirsty and stopping at the store is a representation for how alike we were. I was the little child who tried to emulate the parent they favored and in this case I only had one and so he was the one I tried to be.
The little restaurant that had closed and was now empty was a manifestation of my family and my relationship with my mother. We used to be a family, but one person left and so we weren’t a family anymore just as the restaurant wasn’t a restaurant once it was empty. The physical void of the space in the building and the fact that it was white which is connotative of sterility was my relationship with my mother; it was biological technicalities which connected us which gave way for a great deal of emotional distance.
The Oasis bar itself is based in memory of my grandfather who was a drunkard and growing up I heard many stories about him drinking and therefore associated him with a bar or tavern. The sign for the tavern was old and simple which were how my grandfather was always described; old school and a simple man. The Garth Brooks connection comes in as another representation of my mother as when I lived with her before my father received custody she always had country music playing in her car.
I saw the stop signs in my dream because they always annoyed me when we went to the coast and stopped in Winchester Bay. They were only about 50 feet apart and I thought such a structuring was ludicrous since it impaired our car from getting to the tourist shops and the Coast Guard station that much longer. My wanting my father to “up the gas” is another representation of my impatience while at the coast. Also, the launch ramp at the Coast Guard station and my anxiety of going down the ramp is showing my fear of the water and drowning and also foreshadows our actual plummet into the water as the ramp and the sloped land at the end of the parking lot are of similar nature and outcome were we to go down both.
Looking back upon my memories of the dream as the years go by I can’t help but laugh at my thought about the bird in the parking lot. In my dream I say it with such scientific authority as if the bird is truly a marvel being able to sleep with only one leg, when in all reality having only one leg has nothing to do with his sleeping. I also think that it is in the dream as a distraction as an example of how the mind can wander and shift the physicality of the body just as my pondering the bird calms me down because I’m no longer worried about going over the edge of the parking lot.
The mistrust in my father’s judgment of being too close to the edge comes from a resentment I held for my father. I resented him for having failed at his marriage to my mother. I saw it as him not making the right decisions which would have kept her around and married to him; which would have kept her in our house as my mother to teach me how to be a little girl and a young lady and which would have kept us in status as a “normal” family. He was my Daddy and he took care of me, but he couldn’t take care of me the way I knew that a mother is supposed to and because he lacked that ability and the power to keep my mother around I resented him. This is where my talking to he and my grandmother but not being heard and my screaming with no sound coming out tie into the big picture. I couldn’t tell my Dad how I felt and I felt like he wouldn’t understand even if I had tried or that if he did he still wouldn’t be able to give me solace from the situation.
I take charge in the dream after we’re going under the water because of my mistrust of his judgment and I feel that I know how to save us all. It’s me taking action to keep us intact as a unit, a family and to keep us as normal as is possible. My words of direction were my actions of silence in real life. By keeping silent about my resentment of both parents for getting divorced and breaking our family, my fears of emulating my father too long and never becoming a proper lady like having a mother around would make me, and about my anger towards my mother for not calling me or paying me attention like a good parent would to their child whom they love (i.e. my mother shows me no attention and therefore must not love me).
My father sinking back into the water while I’m swimming my grandmother to the surface is the fact that I figured out how to handle all of the emotions and issues inside of my child mind but hadn’t thought of the consequences. With saving my grandmother and keeping silent I didn’t realize that I would be unable to save my father and essentially prolong my childlike innocence. My grandmother was my mother-figure growing up and so saving her also represents a fear of never becoming feminine if I were to save my father. But becoming a woman means that I’m leaving behind my father.
Once the dreams became lucid more often I found a pattern of saving my father because I could go back to sleep after the dream if I let my grandmother die because she was old and would die soon anyway and because I couldn’t fathom my life without my father around because then I would have no parent left in the world to raise, care for and love me. My father was the source of my confidence as a child. He lived for me and I validated his life and by doing so my life was validated. I could understand life being tomboyish and undainty because I knew I had mastered it, but I feared failing at being feminine because it was still the unknown. My father dying at the end of the first dream disturbed me when awake and by that showed me how dependent I was on him. My father’s death and my grandmothers survival at the end of the first dream shows my true desire to become feminine and the dainty little girl that I was not when I was having the dreams.
Social pressures from seeing families in school and on television gave doubts to my life as a normal one. The issue began to consume me like the panic which consumed me in the car as it goes underwater. The coast was a symbol of home, comfort and normalcy that was beginning to be plagued by doubt, mistrust, resentment and rebellion. My father and grandmother took the social paradigm representations of their genders and the stereotypical social associations that go with the coordinating biological sex of those genders. My dream is the manifestation of an inner-battle between my mastery of masculine emulation and my co-existing desire and fear of femininity and the realization via the end of my dream that one will have to die for me to move on in my development.
"Fear of Drowning in Femininity"
When I was a little girl my father used to take my grandmother and I to the coast fairly often as it was one of my grandmother’s favorite places. We always stopped at Winchester Bay on our way when traveling down the coast. Looking out on the bay and back towards the river was a usual thing as my father relayed stories of when he was a kid or when my grandfather worked at a shingle mill in Gardner, a small town just down the river a small way. One day while we were looking out at the bay I looked down to see where the car was in relation to the edge of the pavement and saw that we were quite close. My father had taken my grandmother and I on various adventures in his car, one of them being stuck on a road with a cliff-edge something like 1,200 to 1,500 feet off the ground and in snow where we could easily plummet to our death if my father didn’t drive carefully. We made it out alive, but my father had a way of putting me on edge and in fear of my own death at such times. However, the death I always pictured was gruesome or torturous such as death by fire or slowly dying in a mangled car in a canyon where nobody could get to us or would even discover our bodies until months after we had died.
So being prone to basically daydreaming about the possibilities as to how we could die being on the edge of the parking lot, I told him that he was too close to the edge and that he should pull away from it and park the car further away. He said we’d be fine, but then turned around and I must have been as white as a ghost because he immediately moved the car. Though several times after that trip he was just as close and I didn’t say anything but was still scared. I believe my mistrust of my father’s judgments in regards to our safety, my fear of drowning which is a constant fight for life against death and my fear of being trapped in a car under water where I’m claustrophobically cloistered until my death upon asphyxiation occurs gave way to the following recurring dream.
I’m sitting in the backseat of my father’s car as he, my grandmother and I are driving to the coast. Blurs of various shades of green fill the frame that the back window creates for my view. All of a sudden we’re pulling off the main highway and into Winchester Bay. We go down the road and there’s the market on the left side where I got a soda once when we stopped there because my father and I were thirsty. And there, just a few places down that side of the street is the little restaurant which we ate at before it closed down. It’s still empty and white. This makes me sad. “Oh!” I think, and there across from the empty restaurant is that little tavern the Oasis that I didn’t realize was a bar until just a recent visit to the coast. “Wow I’m naïve, though then again it always reminded me of that Garth Brooks song ‘Low Places’ ‘cause I thought he sang ‘Oh, I got friends in Oasis’,” says my self-ridiculing inner-monologue.
We go further down the road, past the first stop sign and take a right at the second stop sign. The parking lot on our right is fairly empty for such a nice day out and the little tourist shops on our left don’t seem to be too busy either except for the little diner we often frequent when in Winchester Bay. I look back at the road and our surroundings are taking forever to get out of my window framed view. My reactionary mental noting being, “Geez Dad, could you drive any slower? I think the speed limit’s 10 so maybe you can up the gas a little.”
As we round the corner, I see the little bait shop and store on the corner. It’s yellow and brown and very old. Then I remember the time that we all camped here and came over to the store because it was all that was left open so late at night and I got handfuls of penny candies. When I look back to the front of the car we’re by the Coast Guard station and the boat launch next to it. I begin to fear that my Dad is going to go down the ramp to get a closer look at the water. My anxiety builds and I begin to grit my teeth and sit on my hands. He makes a small swoop of the steering wheel and we go past the launch instead of down its ramp. My heart stops beating so frantically and I look out the backseat window again.
I blink and now we’re on the opposite side of the Bay. I look behind me through the back window of the car and see the crab cages lined along the pavement in front of a boat dry-docked over a gravel lot. We’re creeping along the edge of the viewing lot for the Bay. There’s what feels like 2 feet but is really about 8 or 9 feet between our right front tire and the edge of the land, which slopes off into the water. I get an ominous feeling again and my heart starts to beat rapidly. I fear that we’re going to go over the edge and into the water somehow. I say to my father, “Watch out Dad you’re getting close to the edge.” He brakes and replies, “It’s ok honey, we’ve got plenty of room and Daddy won’t go over the edge. I promise,” as he turns around to look me in the eye and grab my knee to comfort and assure me. I try and believe him and so I look out the left backseat window and at the birds walking around on the lot. I calm down and see that one of them has only one leg. I think to myself, “How can he sleep with only one leg?”
Then I notice that my father has stopped the car, put it in park, applied the emergency brake and turned off the engine. We’re sitting in the car, looking out upon the Bay and the anxiety hits me again. I can’t explain it and I want to tell my father and warn him that something bad is going to happen, but they can’t hear me when I speak to them. My father and grandmother are talking with each other and the car starts to move. The emergency brake is failing and we’re slowly moving toward the slope of the lot and nearer the water. Neither see nor feel the car’s movement before we start to roll down the slope. I’m scared and scream but nothing comes out. My father tries to calm me and says that everything will be okay, but I don’t believe him.
Our front end slips into the water and then the murky color of the water begins to cover the windshield. The slight claustrophobia I have is quickly beginning to grow into full blown claustrophobia. I tell my Dad to roll down the window and swim out and that I will jump to the front and roll down my grandmother’s and help her get out with us. The next thing I know all three of us are in the water on our way to the surface. But something happens and my father starts to sink back down. My grandmother is out like a light and not responding. I’m faced with the decision of either saving the life of my grandmother and killing my father because I can’t rescue him or vice versa. I begin crying and I feel tears stream down my face even though I’m under water. I figure that it’s best to take my grandma to the surface and to the sloped shore. Since we weren’t far from the shore when we went into the water I can quickly get my grandma to safety and then I’ll go back down and save my Dad. Then I’m back in the water on my way down to get my Dad. I get down to him but I see that it’s too late and he’s already dead. Then I wake up.
The dream was recurring and each time it became more lucid and I would try and save both my grandmother and my father. I would attempt with one first and then the other and every time got the same outcome of one alive and one dead. One time the dream happened and I told my father to take my grandma because he was stronger and could save her easier than I could and that time both of them ended up dying.
The coast is a place that we often visited and felt like a second home. It was where we bonded and where we were a family. The blurred green in the window frame was all I would see on our drives to the coast growing up and the abundant amount of different shades amazed me at the beauty of nature and made me feel alive. Going to the coast was “our thing” and a sort of ritual which made me feel as though I was living life to its fullest experience.
The memories of Winchester Bay are strong in my mind as a child because they were times when I felt validated by my father. We’d gone camping and fishing and played on the beach like normal families do. I felt “different” growing up because my parents had divorced and I hadn’t seen my mother since after their divorce and my father won custody of me. Doing the things that normal families do made me feel more normal. The part about my father and I being thirsty and stopping at the store is a representation for how alike we were. I was the little child who tried to emulate the parent they favored and in this case I only had one and so he was the one I tried to be.
The little restaurant that had closed and was now empty was a manifestation of my family and my relationship with my mother. We used to be a family, but one person left and so we weren’t a family anymore just as the restaurant wasn’t a restaurant once it was empty. The physical void of the space in the building and the fact that it was white which is connotative of sterility was my relationship with my mother; it was biological technicalities which connected us which gave way for a great deal of emotional distance.
The Oasis bar itself is based in memory of my grandfather who was a drunkard and growing up I heard many stories about him drinking and therefore associated him with a bar or tavern. The sign for the tavern was old and simple which were how my grandfather was always described; old school and a simple man. The Garth Brooks connection comes in as another representation of my mother as when I lived with her before my father received custody she always had country music playing in her car.
I saw the stop signs in my dream because they always annoyed me when we went to the coast and stopped in Winchester Bay. They were only about 50 feet apart and I thought such a structuring was ludicrous since it impaired our car from getting to the tourist shops and the Coast Guard station that much longer. My wanting my father to “up the gas” is another representation of my impatience while at the coast. Also, the launch ramp at the Coast Guard station and my anxiety of going down the ramp is showing my fear of the water and drowning and also foreshadows our actual plummet into the water as the ramp and the sloped land at the end of the parking lot are of similar nature and outcome were we to go down both.
Looking back upon my memories of the dream as the years go by I can’t help but laugh at my thought about the bird in the parking lot. In my dream I say it with such scientific authority as if the bird is truly a marvel being able to sleep with only one leg, when in all reality having only one leg has nothing to do with his sleeping. I also think that it is in the dream as a distraction as an example of how the mind can wander and shift the physicality of the body just as my pondering the bird calms me down because I’m no longer worried about going over the edge of the parking lot.
The mistrust in my father’s judgment of being too close to the edge comes from a resentment I held for my father. I resented him for having failed at his marriage to my mother. I saw it as him not making the right decisions which would have kept her around and married to him; which would have kept her in our house as my mother to teach me how to be a little girl and a young lady and which would have kept us in status as a “normal” family. He was my Daddy and he took care of me, but he couldn’t take care of me the way I knew that a mother is supposed to and because he lacked that ability and the power to keep my mother around I resented him. This is where my talking to he and my grandmother but not being heard and my screaming with no sound coming out tie into the big picture. I couldn’t tell my Dad how I felt and I felt like he wouldn’t understand even if I had tried or that if he did he still wouldn’t be able to give me solace from the situation.
I take charge in the dream after we’re going under the water because of my mistrust of his judgment and I feel that I know how to save us all. It’s me taking action to keep us intact as a unit, a family and to keep us as normal as is possible. My words of direction were my actions of silence in real life. By keeping silent about my resentment of both parents for getting divorced and breaking our family, my fears of emulating my father too long and never becoming a proper lady like having a mother around would make me, and about my anger towards my mother for not calling me or paying me attention like a good parent would to their child whom they love (i.e. my mother shows me no attention and therefore must not love me).
My father sinking back into the water while I’m swimming my grandmother to the surface is the fact that I figured out how to handle all of the emotions and issues inside of my child mind but hadn’t thought of the consequences. With saving my grandmother and keeping silent I didn’t realize that I would be unable to save my father and essentially prolong my childlike innocence. My grandmother was my mother-figure growing up and so saving her also represents a fear of never becoming feminine if I were to save my father. But becoming a woman means that I’m leaving behind my father.
Once the dreams became lucid more often I found a pattern of saving my father because I could go back to sleep after the dream if I let my grandmother die because she was old and would die soon anyway and because I couldn’t fathom my life without my father around because then I would have no parent left in the world to raise, care for and love me. My father was the source of my confidence as a child. He lived for me and I validated his life and by doing so my life was validated. I could understand life being tomboyish and undainty because I knew I had mastered it, but I feared failing at being feminine because it was still the unknown. My father dying at the end of the first dream disturbed me when awake and by that showed me how dependent I was on him. My father’s death and my grandmothers survival at the end of the first dream shows my true desire to become feminine and the dainty little girl that I was not when I was having the dreams.
Social pressures from seeing families in school and on television gave doubts to my life as a normal one. The issue began to consume me like the panic which consumed me in the car as it goes underwater. The coast was a symbol of home, comfort and normalcy that was beginning to be plagued by doubt, mistrust, resentment and rebellion. My father and grandmother took the social paradigm representations of their genders and the stereotypical social associations that go with the coordinating biological sex of those genders. My dream is the manifestation of an inner-battle between my mastery of masculine emulation and my co-existing desire and fear of femininity and the realization via the end of my dream that one will have to die for me to move on in my development.