Dreaming the Feminine in Body and Soul

The words in my dream journal are part of a 1:00 a.m. note, written when I woke suddenly from a dream that seemed to overwhelm me but apparently not enough that I couldn’t still utter the word “archetypal,” reaching back into my literature classes and study of Jungian psychology in my attempt to capture this nighttime essence before it envelopes me in some indistinguishable shade.

I am clearly on a mission, searching for something that the dream seems to suggest involved the feminine, a theme I might have picked up as I wandered through a least three houses, sighting in passing images that might have been my mother, sister Pat, or that girl who flirted with me at my father’s wake when I was fifteen and still in short pants, perhaps a nod to my British upbringing that seemed too enamored of the schoolboy look.

The schoolboy angle seems to disappear into some stage-right, dream exit, as the feminine now seemed to dominate, certainly with some faint sexual overtones but more about my power being in service to the feminine that seems to invite no pushback from me. The word “revisioning” appears in scattered form across the dream screen, as a prompt, and perhaps reminding me of the terms to used to help explain “Revisioning Theology,” my graduate school search for the feminine in religion.

Apparently, the dream did not see my PhD-bound antics as sufficient for the occasion and perhaps bowed to my unconscious, carnal motives. In any event the dream indicated that my job was indeed to be in service to women, not in a strict sexual sense but my appropriately massaging their limbs to the sound of some sacred tune my priest had not fully explained. However, in the dreams the slow, delicate, massage movement of my hands along the arms and legs of women seemed restrained, professional and almost spiritual, as if the individuals were in the mold of a goddess, present but at a distance to be served and venerated. This was a felt presence and not at all doctrinal.

I was there to provide service; to be wary of veins, blood flow beneath the surface, the texture of the skin, composition of muscles and how all this activity, this physiology, this venous supply related to the wholeness of the body that was under my fingers, as if I was engaged with the human element that in the totality had a touch of the divine.

As I write in my dream journal: “At first, I fell into the dream, expecting the ‘masseuse’ role would certainly be my ‘cup of tea,’ as my British mother might say, but in a completely different context. Instead of my hands all over the feminine body, the dream cautioned me to be slow, deliberate and respectful, being knowledgeable about and sensitive to the female body as well as the psyche, both related in the psychology and theology of wholeness.”

“On reflection the dream is an invitation for me to consider and contemplate the body and spirit of the feminine, the wholeness within. I sense an introduction to the divine in the bits and dreams pieces at my feet.”

I’ll close with a poem from my book “Set Pieces of the Feminine,” that seemed in the spirit of dream in question.

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The Birth

The event begins in a woman’s

Whisper, neither coaxing

Nor stern,

Just there

Like the top of a note

That hangs.

The voice is art

Waiting for the heart

To find the fiddle line.

A hint of a child

Emerges

As from a cloud

And the chant now is ancient,

A mournful Gregorian plea

Summoning a chorus of the blessed

To witness the birth of a son.

The soul takes the song low

To the strains of blood and earth

Soothing the cries

Coming from the birth canal.

The orchestra collapses into

A pulling reed the baby

Seems to ride

Arriving head first

Arms at his side

As if on a luge.

He is not slapped into life

But spoken there

With words falling from the strings

As the veil of anointing

Falls in rhapsody

From his body touched

Only by the hands of God.