Breaking Through Her Shell
Dreamed c.1985 by Mimi, as told by Patricia Garfield
One still-nervous bride reported a nightmare that she had just three days after her marriage. Mimi is fortyish. This was her third marriage, and it was causing her some trepidation; her new husband was a few years younger than she. She believed this nightmare to be a landmark--after it, she felt fully commited to him:
I am a spirit flying up in the air. I see myself below, sitting in a green meadow. I am twenty (instead of my age). "Oh, that's me," I say. I swoop down and say to the young-me, "'Who do you love?" The young-me says, "No one." "What, not even Sean [her new husband]?" I ask. The young-me says, "I love no one!"Hurt and bewildered following her second divorce, Mimi said, "I didn't know if I could ever trust a man again." Her dream revealed to her the danger of protectively withholding herself from her new husband. Mimi dreaded being hurt again, as do we all when once scalded. Yet her dream dramatically displays the consequences of holding feelings back in the new relationship--she might lose her husband to someone else. Mimi described the crystal as a "hard shell" she put around herself for protection.Then a middle-aged lady, plain and a little plump, with short brown hair--more my true age--says, "All right, if that's the way you want it, look at this!"
I seem to see an alternate future, what will happen if I don't love Sean. I see him surrounded by friends who are congratulating him on being newly married--but not to me. They are laughing and having a good time. (No bride is in sight.) I say, "Oh, no. He's supposed to be my husband!"
I run up to him and begin pounding on his chest. He doesn't. feel it or see me or anything because I am invisible. I'm surrounded by a kind of crystal shell. I'm saying, "No, Sean! I love you! I love you! I do love you!" But he can't see me.
I start to cry. The crystal shell that makes me invisible cracks around me. We hold each other and say we love each other.
By breaking through it in the dream, with her emotions, Mimi was able to make contact with the man she wanted and loved. So, too, in life. Mimi realized that, like everyone, she must risk being hurt in order to love and be loved.
--Patricia Garfield
SOURCE: Women's Bodies, Women's Dreams by Patricia Garfield, 1988, p.155
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