Her First Incarnation
Dreamed 1983/11/10 by Wayan
A mob of barbarians yells at me "You're a bad driver!" Funny, since I'm not driving.
From my bike, I yell back "My car's brakes are bad. I CAN'T drive till they're fixed." My bike brakes are worn too, but they work, and I can tighten them easily.
They keep yelling. Their put-downs turn more personal and nasty. Picking a fight.
Not a verbal one. They choose a champion to duel me.
I'm alone--I can't choose a champion who knows how to fight. Well, there's one. My spirit! I watch as it pours out of my body to form my alter ego. Their champion's a big swordsman with two knives for backup; mine, small and delicate but a master of the boomerang knives.
He provokes their champion into throwing HIS knives like boomerangs; he misses and they don't return like mine. I worry my champion will use up his own knives, and a few throws go wild. But as they both throw, my spirit steadily gains blades.
At last my champion scoops up two blades and tosses elaborate curved shots behind the enemy simultaneously, in formation. But the big guy bats them off with his sword, then counterattacks. Leaps atop a stone wall, and turns himself into... giant sticky pink lips!
In response, my champion pours all his soul-force into his own flying blades, BECOMES them; as he throws, he vanishes into the blades. They zip like wasps, stabbing the lips...
And stick. Trapped! Lip-goo covers my spirit. Turns it, me, into a brown-skinned and more visible being, not quite natural color, with simplified muscles, more the idea of musculature than the full complexity of human muscles... but still, a body.
The first time this spirit's been IN a body. Disorienting! Looks around timid & puzzled.
Now she's a slender brown teenage girl in a white robe. I feel attracted and protective, both.
I lead her into a theater, sit and talk. Try to explain flesh to her; not easy. Zero experience! Her first incarnation.
People on the movie screen turn and talk to her too, about living in a body...
Not easy. If you never have.
NOTES IN THE MORNING
37 YEARS LATER
Gender dysphoria was rarely diagnosed in 1983, but I sure felt it. With good physical reason! I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, giving me fragile joints, easy bruising, constant sprains & dislocations. Just too delicate for male games--sports, fighting, risk-taking, status-quarrels. It took decades for me to learn the genetic cause, but even then I knew--my body's violin cannot play in the key of butch.
Like a lot of EDS patients, I'm an Aspie too--an autistic with high IQ, shyness, easily overloaded senses. In sum: difficulty being in a body at all. This dream, though surreal, was an accurate warning. One that doctors never gave me, despite decades of tests. Over fifty years to diagnosis! Self-diagnosis. Then I had to force my doctors to face it.
Dreams often use unlikely symbols to bare mundane truths. Here, wildly unlikely images turn out to refer to wildly unlikely truths.
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