My pajamas have little jolly rogers on them.
I had two dreams. I relate them to you here.
The first dream has already become muzzy but for a few scenes. I dream in color, vividly, with intense emotional feedback.
1. Archel Steals My Boyfriend
Madame Archel is set to pose for my boyfriend. He is a photographer. He makes a comment to me about her petite, yet voluptuous beauty (implying that my own slender, geeky redheadedness is inadequate) that angers me. He continues to speak to me belittlingly, as he does in real like when he is fed up with me. I feel as if I am ten years old, competing with all the older, developed girls around me for a beautiful young man whom I have a crush on. Things become weirder.
He and Archel continue to bait me, making me feel as if I have failed some test, and to the victor go the spoils. The next scene has me attacking her with fist and nail, trying to dislodge her perfectly shining lipstick and give her a black eye or two. My boyfriend continues to belittle and taunt me, and eventually I strike at him, too.
But they are dream creatures, and my puny blows do nothing but increase their contempt.
Analysis
Madame Archel is not my enemy, or even my rival, in meatspace or cyberspace. I barely know her. I don't recall ever meeting her, although I might've. However, she and I both auditioned for Abney Park a few months ago, and I was rejected and she accepted. This may be all the impetus my brain needed to put her in the role she played in my dream.
As for my boyfriend, he is going to Portland to attend Lewis and Clark School of Law, hours away from my home in Seattle. He will be among women his own age (I am only 19 to his 24) who are smart, educated, and who share many interests with him. They will be going through the gauntlet that is law school right along with him, and nothing breeds more familiarity than shared trauma. I fear losing him to someone smarter, older, prettier and more educated. I fear this very much.
2. Eliza Makes a Fool of Herself for the Goblin King
In this dream I follow Jareth around a beautiful series of dream-sets in an attempt to win his favor. I try politeness, coyness, begging, and finally promise that I will allow him to use magic keys that I had thrown into a pond (to hide them from him) to make me into whatever he desires me to be. This is the only thing I say during the dream that really gets his attention.
Analysis
This is not a dream about wanting to get into
David Bowie's pants, although I've had those, too. In this dream, Jareth represents either my boyfriend or some overarching male principle, perhaps in relation to an
Electra complex. Again, my fear of being undesirable to my mate surfaces, but this time it is accompanied by my willingness to relinquish my identity in order to win his favor.
This makes me think of my intense efforts to change my behavior, manner of talking, and even my posture to appease my father when I was little. My mother worked at her law firm all day, every day, and I was raised primarily in early childhood by my Vietnam-veteran father. He was never abusive, but I craved his approval more than anything else in the world. I adopted his facial expressions, body language, speaking patterns. Why? Why was this so important to me, when my mother didn't figure so prominently in my immediate mentality? It confuses me.