Anima and Animus

the Stuff Dreams are made of...
1

I have a crush on this little-known actor. He talks at conventions, and people started taking videos of it, and when I watch them on YouTube he just seems so generous and genuine. I fantasize about us talking through our problems (mostly mine, because I don’t have the imagination to create personal problems for someone I only know as a bunch of lights and pixels in my computer, but I’m guessing the real him has them because doesn’t everyone?)

One night I dreamed that he walked me home from work, and we overheard my co-workers gossping about him. I jumped on one of them, determined to defend his honor and tear her hair out, but she was just more physically able than me. The dream continued, that I was home and I told my roommate about what had happened during my work day. At the fight scene part of my story, she said, “If you didn’t want them to start gossip, why did you tell them that he was your boyfriend? It’s not even true.” And I realized that it wasn’t, that I only saw him through internet videos, we’d never met let alone become close enough that he would walk me home from work just because, and that what I told her must have been a dream. I know, I was so close to making it lucid!

Here’s what happened in waking life. I told another friend (psyche major, already practicing) about the whole dream above, and she interpreted it as… Well, this man in my mind, is really just a part of me. Everything I admire about him, and try to emulate even if I hadn’t noticed: honesty, courage, kindness, spontaneity, how he seems so happy and secure so much of the time, and always has a joke to make things better when people criticize his performance, a joke that doesn’t put people down just for having their opinions of him… that’s become my Animus. The dream seems to be warning me, she said, that those qualities in myself are being constantly challenged at my workplace and at home.

I thought this was a strange interpretation, because that meant becoming lucid was a bad thing-- when my roommate in the dream made me realize that he couldn’t possibly be my boyfriend for real, what it did in the dreamscape level of reality was this: it divorced myself from my Animus. In my dreams, the relationship with this man meant that I had a good connection with that part of myself, and now that connection is severed.

But it was true, the thing I thought when I became lucid. Lucidity brought me closer to reality and truth, so how can that be bad? Sure, it might be momentarily disappointing, :wink: but I can totally accept that the dream-symbol of this celebrity was only a part of me. I’d be fine with never meeting him in my dreams ever again, because I’d think it was not because we “broke up” but because we were unified. I shouldn’t need to see him in my dreams and fantasies, to behave like the better person I learned to be from him.
Or maybe such acceptance is the illusion, maybe the binary-minded New Agers I hang around with are right about a world divided (though they speak more in terms of dark and light than feminine and masculine,) meaning my overt identity will always have a counterpoint in what I’ve forgotten or denied about myself: a shadow, an Animus. And the only way to truly connect with the world as it is, and with one’s true self, is to remain divided? Wait, what? :help:

All right, ignore that whole ramble above if you like, but I’d like to know: What dreams of yours most prominently feature your Animus or Anima? I don’t even know exactly what those are, but from what I understood they’re respectively the masculine traits present in the psyche of women, and the feminine traits present in the psyche of men. The nature of one’s Anima/Animus determines what you expect from a partner and/or who you’re attracted to, apparently, so they often appear in dreams as the literal dream girl/boy, a spouse, maybe a parent (if Freud was right about you,) a good friend of the dreamer who is also of opposite sex to the dreamer, etc.

And, if anyone out there is able and willing to answer this multi-faceted and flamewar baiting question of mine: How does this Jungian template hold up in the experience of one who is LGBTQ?

2

I think otherwise. If Anima and Animus together creates us and who we really are, separating them, in my opinion, would just be trying to redefine ourselves in terms of “feminine” and “masculine” and that would be denying our own being.

I also don’t think that any action or any trait could be put into categories of masculine or feminine. This is not the same as classifying nouns in grammatical genders, they are not givens but instead must be decided on. But that is also highly improbable to happen.

Let’s take aggression for example. It strikes as masculine at first glance, but what about a mother cat trying to defend her kittens from harm or danger? Who could know if aggression came about from a masculine point of view or a feminine point of view for the first time? Besides, I think not all traits are either masculine or feminine, so an “Animum” is necessary.

I personally don’t have many dreams discovering myself, and especially not my Anima or Animus. Generally thinking about this gets me to the point where I think mine are either balanced or my Animus is slightly more dominant than my Anima, but they don’t seem to appear in my dreams embodied by other people. But there have been quite a few dreams in which I don’t act like I normally do, but more in a fashion of “masculine” or “feminine” as I would define them.

Those dreams generally start normal, then I take one course of action and it ends (like choose your own path books) and then I start again by taking the other way. As situations change and obstructions appear, I am forced to act in one gender and not as myself.

One example is when I was in a maze and was trying desperately to get out, in the feminine version of it, I started crying after going through some places that I felt sure was going to take me outside but didn’t. When it rehappened, I started punching through the walls at that time, and I finally reached outside. There was a scenery, and it was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever dreamed of.

Maybe my inner inner self is trying to favor my Animus over my Anima, but most of these dreams have ended with me being victorious by acting masculine and being defeated when I was being feminine.

I’m skipping the last question because it doesn’t apply to me.

And it is one week and nobody replied to this yet, weird.

3

True. In the dream up there, for example, I can totally accept resorting to physical violence in nothing but an answer to a clear call to defend someone else’s honor, as something I can do without my See You Next Tuesday spontaneously warping into some inhuman and unrecognizable part just 'cause almost everyone else says it’s not ladylike. I’m thinking it might not be so much that the Animus, which is my subconscious idea(l) of masculinity, determining what I see as manly, and therefore how I must feel and behave as a female. It may be a total reverse. The feelings and behavior that I own as mine, shared with the classification of me=female, those create an opposite, for lack of better word rejected, body of traits/projections/feelings/behaviors.

Of course, that leads me to a troubling conclusion that I still hold to gender identities depending on who’s whose leftover psychic flotsam… Animum sounds like a better idea!