Dream Genders

the Stuff Dreams are made of...
1

I’m a completely straight female who has never had any form of bisexual thoughts, yet I often find myself in the role of someone of the opposite gender in my dreams. Sometimes I even have feelings towards a girl in dreams, but when I do I’m regarding myself as 100% male. Occasionally I will have a dream where I know in the back of my mind that I’m really a girl and that I’m simply playing out the role of a guy, but more often than not when I have these dreams I’m completely convinced that I am a guy. It’s like I’ve lost all memory of who I am and start thinking that I have this whole other life as someone of the opposite gender. :bambi:

I’m not homophobic but I know I’m very straight. The idea of myself liking another girl is just plain weird. Yet I keep having these dreams and I’m pretty confused. What could they mean? :confused:

2

Huh, that’s strange. :eh: I’ve read a book on dream meanings, and it could mean something along the line of your subconscious urging on your femininity in life, or qualities such as creativity, gentleness, nurturing, mothering, etc. You could try searching the internet for dream meanings and female relationships. It could also be repressed feelings, but, like you said, you’re certain, which is why I didn’t mention that first. I’ve had dreams where I was male before, but normally I was a younger boy, so there weren’t any romantic or sexual feelings. It’s happened occasionally though. Try to dig a little deeper for the answer, I hope this helped. :wink:

3

Perhaps the idea in your conscious mind’s self, of liking a real life girl, when you yourself are a girl, is just inconceivable? I mean, the subconscious is much, much, much more fluid about everything, it seems. Sometimes there’s no gravity (even if you’re consciously very grounded, acrophobic, whatever,) other times there’s no such thing as time (even if you’re consciously very punctual,) so gender can be very fluid as well (even if you’re consciously heterosexual).

Just as flying can mean a lot of different things depending on the person and the context, so can gender fluidity.

Carl Jung, pretty much the founder of modern dream interpretation, wrote a lot of stuff about the Anima and the Animus. They are, respectfully, the “femininity” present in the psyche of those who identify as male, and the “masculinity” present in the psyche of those who identify as female. He laid them out in very neat gender-binary categories, but I think the effects of their activities in our minds and our dreams really are just… fluid.

4

No one can tell you what they mean exactly; we can only hypothesize. Only you can determine for yourself what they truly mean.

I’ve had gender swap dreams before (only a few I can remember; one even caused me to become spontaneously lucid), but they’ve been so few and far between that I can’t attribute them to anything except just a spur of the moment SC decision.

EllyEve, any chance you can link us something about the Anima and the Animus: sounds really interesting.

(And as for the completely convinced part, in all my dreams I’m practically 100% sure that it’s real… Shows how bad I am at LDing… :razz: )

5

Thanks for the replies, everyone. :smile:

EllyEve: What do you mean by ‘fluid’? I’m just a little confused about what you mean. :smile:

Scipio Xaos: In a lot of my dreams I’m slightly aware in the back of my mind, not enough to make me lucid but I’m still aware. It’s like… I’m semilucid but don’t care and just go along with the dream. However sometimes I get dreams where I’m absolutely 100% sure it’s real and those are the weirdest ones. It’s truly a very odd feeling waking up from a dream after being completely convinced that I’m a guy and thinking, “what the HECK did I just dream of??”

6

LOL. I know what you mean. Some dreams can be just so unusual that when you wake up you question your sanity. :razz: Worse still are the dreams of things you want. You wake up and you’re like “Y U NO BE MORE THAN JUST A DREAM!!” :razz:

7

I’ve had dreams about being a male before. (I’m a straight female, also, if you were wondering). Most of the times I find myself being a male in situations where men are taken more seriously. I’ve been a male battle commander, for instance. It’s not that I see anything wrong with being a female, gender stereotypes blah blah. For me being a male in my dreams brings out the masculine traits in me, opposed to the natural feminine ones. Kinda like a yin yang thing.

8

Alas, no good links that I know of except for the wiki entry. June Singer’s Boundaries of the Soul was the only really detailed book that I read on them, and it wasn’t confusing when I read it? But, I realize now that it was too complex for me to keep in my memory with any accuracy.

I did use that word a lot, didn’t I? Hrmm, what did I mean… Dreams don’t seem to have categories as our conscious selves understand it. Your refrigerator can turn into a velociraptor. Your female self can turn into a male self.

Your male self can then turn into a heterosexual refrigerator that, upon exploring its bi/homo sexuality because it’s constantly being defrosted by Severus Snape from Harry Potter, becomes a homosexual male velociraptor, and then goes to court Snape only to find that it isn’t Alan Rickman as Snape in the Harry Potter movie, it’s Alan Rickman as the Metatron in the Dogma movie, and he isn’t “anatomically impaired as a Ken doll,” at all, actually, but this man has a vagina. You dream that this velociraptor-refrigerator-persona of yours… has no problem with that.

Then you wake up, into a situation that is completely removed from that-- the crystallized category of waking life, where you identify as a mammal, not a reptile or household appliance. You don’t even identify as a Harry Potter fan.

Why did your dreaming mind confuse those categories? They seem so clear and far apart, and stable, in your waking life! Why?

Because… the dreaming mind does that, I’m pretty sure. The dreaming mind does that often. It just does*.

I guess I consider it like this: the conscious mind is a salt crystal, the subconscious is an ocean. Whatever walls, distance, or disconnect between one grain of consciousness and another, that is, one idea (“I am female”) and another (“I am heterosexual” “that is male” “I am not male”) will just break down and mix together. They break down in the waves of sleepiness, they mix in the currents of REM, and you get a dream: “I am male male heterosexual, that is female I am I am not.”

Jungian psychology might suggest that the currents flowed that way in the first place, to bring those ideas together in exactly that way, because of the magnetism of your Anima and Animus. I’m more inclined to attribute it to chaos.

  • Back me up here, LDers. I can’t be the only one having NLD’s this bizarre about Alan Rickman!
9

I did use that word a lot, didn’t I? Hrmm, what did I mean… Dreams don’t seem to have categories as our conscious selves understand it. Your refrigerator can turn into a velociraptor. Your female self can turn into a male self.

Your male self can then turn into a heterosexual refrigerator that, upon exploring its bi/homo sexuality because it’s constantly being defrosted by Severus Snape from Harry Potter, becomes a homosexual male velociraptor, and then goes to court Snape only to find that it isn’t Alan Rickman as Snape in the Harry Potter movie, it’s Alan Rickman as the Metatron in the Dogma movie, and he isn’t “anatomically impaired as a Ken doll,” at all, actually, but this man has a vagina. You dream that this velociraptor-refrigerator-persona of yours… has no problem with that.

Then you wake up, into a situation that is completely removed from that-- the crystallized category of waking life, where you identify as a mammal, not a reptile or household appliance. You don’t even identify as a Harry Potter fan.

Why did your dreaming mind confuse those categories? They seem so clear and far apart, and stable, in your waking life! Why?

Because… the dreaming mind does that, I’m pretty sure. The dreaming mind does that often. It just does*.

I guess I consider it like this: the conscious mind is a salt crystal, the subconscious is an ocean. Whatever walls, distance, or disconnect between one grain of consciousness and another, that is, one idea (“I am female”) and another (“I am heterosexual” “that is male” “I am not male”) will just break down and mix together. They break down in the waves of sleepiness, they mix in the currents of REM, and you get a dream: “I am male male heterosexual, that is female I am I am not.”

Jungian psychology might suggest that the currents flowed that way in the first place, to bring those ideas together in exactly that way, because of the magnetism of your Anima and Animus. I’m more inclined to attribute it to chaos.

  • Back me up here, LDers. I can’t be the only one having NLD’s this bizarre about Alan Rickman!
    [/quote]

Very true. I often have incredibly bizarre dreams that make absolutely no sense. However the theme of being someone of the opposite gender is incredibly common. Usually there’s a reason, at least with me, why I often dream of something. For example, I dream of being in a barn or around horses almost every single night because I am a horse freak and I love horses. I often dream of going to school because school is stressful and thus I think of it often. But the theme of being someone of the opposite gender has no apparent obvious meaning, which I find odd and confusing…

10

Thanks anyway. The wiki was very interesting to read. I may look up some of his books in the future for kicks.

11

I’m like the opposite of the above poster. o.o

I’m mostly FEmale in my dreams, and I do have bi tendancies (i’m also like the girliest girl in the history OF EVER).

…I have dreamed I was male characters before, though. But it ain’t common :U

Not that I love my girlyness i do still have emotional struggles with it. A lot of it may be due to my interactions with negative online people :sad: Lets not talk about it? is pretty sensitive…about that…

This is an interesting thread. Why is gender and its ‘roles’ so important to people? :razz: As for me…life isn’t about gender to me, really. ‘Girly’ things seem ‘morally correct’ to me (Cute things and ‘happy’ things overall?), my real attraction to them. Not to conform to a gender, not much, anyways. Maybe a little, but yeah…

12

This is a topic I actually reflected on a lot, since I’ve had recurring gender-bending dreams since I was a 6-7 year old. This usually happened by having a false awakening, going to the bathroom and noticing I had boy parts, to say it that way. This always led to instant panic and shame, and I usually immediately started looking for a knife or scissors to fix the problem. :razz: On waking, however, I was never confused by this, instead I thought “Phew, I’m so glad I’m actually NOT a boy!”

Then as I grew, I had situations like those in the first post here – I’m straight, but I would dream of being a man and being with a girl, and when this first happened it made me briefly confused, but I remember reading that some people interpreted such dreams as a reflection of the need for tenderness and comfort. This made sense to me, so I didn’t worry about it too much.

However, there was another kind of dreams that always worried me, and in these I was a man who would force himself upon a girl, and often these dreams ended with violence and contained very strong feelings. These upset me a lot, until I had a dream I was a girl, and was being chased by a killer. When I finally gathered enough courage to confront him, he turned into a girl and started running away from me. I realized then that I saw girls as the physically weaker sex, and that my dreams about being dominant might have just been a reflection of my wish to establish myself in my society. They may also have had something to do with the fact that having female children is still considered as something of a disappointment and shame where I live (among the older people at least), and that I always had this feeling that life would be easier if I was born as a male.

I haven’t had any of the violent dreams recently, but I do still sometimes dream I’m a man, or that I switch bodies. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.

13

So yeah i had an interesting (and also terrifying) dream tonight that made me think of this thread. And how people in this thread stated that a female who like’s others girls dreaming they are male might be a ‘normal’ thing. But like I really wanna believe that…lol

So anyways, I did dream i was male (i’m a woman who’s been big time crushing on a female pokemon character for nearly 4 and a half months now too. thought i’d mention that.).

I dreamed I was a little boy, and i had a twin brother. And that mean adults were trying to trap me in this building, as long as the lights were out. It was mega weird, and i was too scared to sleep again when i woke up from this dream o.O My twin brother also had a crush on one of the mean adults, and she was some pink loving woman who REALLY wanted to trap us. Also, at the beginning of this dream, i was myself, and there was this other woman trying to force herself on me.

I can’t help but wonder what this whole dream meant…also by twin bros were they reffering to me and my brother in real life?

I think as twins me and my dream brother both had blonde hair too. And i find that kinda funny…the character i have a crush on is also blonde. hmn.