I was out with an old friend and we found a shop that sold pizzas. We didn’t want pizzas, we needed water. But we bought them anyway and allowed them to go off for days before we ate them. It made us feel sick.

I was at my parent’s house, dressed and in a flat and not very flattering floral dress, which I was wearing over my usual clothes. I had makeup smeared haphazardly on my face. Nobody seemed to be acknowledging this in any way, and this was difficult for me. I wanted to be acknowledged, but I didn’t have the words to say as what.

It got too much, overwhelming. I ran off, and my dad broke away and ran after me. Before long I was in Brighton, on a street called London Road, where the less salubrious independent shops are. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I was in the future; shops were different. I saw a shop that sold transformations. I was still running from my parents, and it seemed a good place to hide, but more than that I wanted to be in there. I stepped inside.

It was a calming, cool place, all light blues,with a little fountain on a table top where water trickled gently over glass. There was incense, and a little salon bit away from the main area. The proprietor of the shop was Michael, from the TV show called The Good Place. He is tall, white haired, suited, and the perfect embodiment of reassuring white male authority. He smiled at me, and said “Hello Jeannette.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

He apologised. He closed up the windows so nobody could get in and took me through to the salon and sat me down on a chair. He knew that I had a desire, that there was a reason I was here. But he made me say it.

“I am a transwoman.”

He smiled. That done, he offered to help. He took a syringe and plumped up my lips with some stuff. I wondered why he had started there. Having thin lips isn’t great, but it’s hardly the most important thing to change. A squirt of the stuff went into my mouth. It tasted bitter.

When I was done there, I walked down the street to a police station, and wandered around it. There was an old book on a high shelf, dog-eared and abandoned. It read “The Diary of a London Shit-Eater”. I opened it up. It was full of tables detailing what shit the author had eaten, where, with details about what it had been like.

I was told, somehow, that this was a magical book and a magical place. If I could sleep holding this book, in this place, then I would wake up holding it in the real world and I would have the ability to bring things out of the dream world into the waking one. I would gain powers and the knowledge and control of dreams.

Instead, I woke up in another version of the police station. The walls were painted in names, layers and layers of names all in glittery pens. I took one, and started to write.

A man next to me started to berate me. He was a Taoist and believed that people were foolish and immoral to bring their egos into here. AlI the people who had scrawled their egotistic messages annoyed him. He said that if I wanted to leave a mark, I should draw the yin-yang symbol instead. I carried on writing.

He was suddenly fine with me--I was clearly writing the name of a girl I liked, not my name. That was fine. Love for someone else is still an act against the ego. I did not get to complete the name.

Dream notes

• The dress: my plan, last year, was to wear a dress for Halloween and to see how it felt. It was a plan that I really obsessed over. This dream sort of told me the problems with it - just wearing a dress would never be enough. Wearing a costume wasn’t what I was looking for.
• Starting on the lips: I think I expected Michael to be rough with me in the dream, like, just by walking in there he might just transform me. Instead, he made me say what I wanted. In the end, saying that I was a transwoman was the transformation. They were really bitter words, and it took me a long time to say them while awake. But that was where I’d started.
• The Police Station: in this dream I finally spoke aloud something that’s been eating me alive for years. I made a change and got to experience the start of womanhood in a really conscious way. And what do I do? I go to a police station and dedicate myself to finding mystical wisdom in a book about eating shit. Ignore the actual lesson and voluntarily go to sleep in a cell.
• There were three male authority figures in this dream: my dad, Michael, and the Taoist. The London Shit Eater might count too--powerful words in an important book I should drop everything and pay attention to. Most of these figures don’t acknowledge me as a woman. Michael does, but even then, he names me. It’s a classic method of control and it’s nor a coincidence that the name he gives me is the same one he used in the show when trying to make his robot girl servant into a sexy trophy wife.
• It is a struggle to get male gatekeepers to accept you as a transwoman. Probably that’s the case with being any woman. They might try to ignore you, or shout at you for being an egotist if your don’t precisely follow their wise ideas, or turn you into their own image of what a girl should be. The last bit is my biggest concern now that I’m looking at private medical help to transition--there’s a lot of men in the world with the power to legally and medically validate my existence if I talk about intimate details of my private life with them. It’s the process and I don’t blame them but it’s dispiriting to realise that a straight cis man could end up being the final arbiter of if I’m trans enough to count as a woman.

I started to wear skirts towards the end of October 2017, by December, I had proper clothes. By February I was admitting to feeling dysphoria to a therapist. In late April I told some selected friends that I was trans. In May I started living as a trans woman. It’s really early days and I can tell you, lipstick is important to me. But the most important thing is being able to say who I am. It’s what everything else came from.

I’ve worn skirts before, just to see if maybe I was trans, and felt nothing. Because it was just a costume. But being able to say who you are and be listened to is real liberation. It’s the most important thing.

Final note

It’s important to me to add this dream to the Bank. When I dreamed it, I’d recently heard back from Wayan about another dream where I was a woman. I wanted to show it to a trans friend because I wanted her to realise I was trans and somehow let me into the club without having to admit anything to myself or anyone else. It never works like this. But… looking through my old dreams, I found a note from ten years ago, where I as much as said I wanted to be a woman. And it suddenly hit me--I’d had so many moments thinking about gender and I’d always written them off as crazy isolated incidents. What if they aren’t? What if it’s a thread running through everything?

So, in some way, The World Dream Bank helped me find my way. Thanks, Wayan, for being another male authority figure. Inasmuch as you play that kind of role.

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