Interpreting dreams in feminine and masculine aspects

Recently I felt compelled to borrow and order a pile of dream-related books; Recalling between five to nine dreams a night is now common for me, and it’s becoming almost too much to try and understand and interpret. But having been armed with more methods of doing so, I feel that one of the most interesting  is to see all the subjects/people as parts of me. Which makes the hilarious dream I had a previous night potentially revealing:

I am hanging out with the cast and extras of the newest Middle Earth movie in a production-crew kind of capacity. It seems to be an outdoor picnic on grass, and the hobbits/dwarfs are actually of the “correct” diminutive height without special effects. I am, apparently, the official penis trimmer. (This must be the R-rated Hobbit movie…) I have a queue of three cast members whose furry members I need to neaten with a tiny scissors before we get back to filming. Everyone involved steps up for the job in good humour — in fact, I find my first two hobbit/dwarves very chatty. The third one is also conversational too, but in such a different way that it takes me a while to realise while I’m examining a penis belonging to a normal-sized human who identifies in every way as female. I have no issue with this, taking her cue to treat her as her chosen identity regardless of anatomy. I am also distracted, after a while, that there is a ballpoint pen that has pierced through her left hand, with no blood. I bring this to her attention with some difficulty, then the awareness makes her panic. The pen is poking through the skin of left hand between the thumb and index finger, and when it is removed, spiders and tiny fish spill out. The fish are dead (like fried anchovies) while the spiders are lively. This “bleeding” of the wound happens twice. I soothe the female that this is “normal”–I’d once deliberately cut my own forehead to release my own spiders.

In case any readers are unaware, being female hardly means only having feminine traits, and vice versa for the male. Neither do feminine and masculine energies have anything relevant, I find, to sexual orientation. Rather, it requires a balance of feminine and masculine aspects in oneself to achieve any spiritual progress–feminine creativity, feeling, receptiveness and allowing; working with masculine focus, logic, steadfastness and activity. It’s interesting to note that the most masculine men and feminine females you’ll run into are rare, and will be relatively two-dimensional compared to more balanced individuals.

So, in my dream, I had three clients but four penii (my blog, my English!), with two penii belonging to the female. The two males were small in stature, which many interpretations would say belie an underdeveloped part of me. (The fuzzy, cuddly and more actively social bits of me?) While I was the “penis trimmer”, I actually did none of this–no one actually needed trimming; maybe cutting anyone down was less necessary than I thought. The last person I had to treat was both more female (she was attractive) and more male than both previous. She was a very strong person to have chosen an identity different from what society would dictate for her based on her private parts. In the dream, I held her in high esteem, and, to analyse her as a part of myself, I would say she is the strong and fully-realised part of me, secure in herself.  But she was also wounded on her left hand–her feminine side, her receiving hand. (This makes a lot of sense to me in my own life…. I’d long internalised the misogyny around me while growing up, and have a lot of trouble accepting recognition and gifts.)

The instrument of the woman’s injury is phallic (literally “the pen is in your hand”). The pen could also be read as a symbol of the logical and material–long seen as the domain of the masculine. Writing is something I use quite often “to make sense” of my feelings. At the same time, it should be remembered that the pen itself never caused bleeding or pain. Rather, the piercing and removal of the pen allowed the body to purge itself of dried fried fish (ideas/projects that never had their chance to get develop?) and small live spiders. The reaction I had to the spiders was relief at their release (better out than in) and spiders have always been a feminine symbol (just think about Charlotte’s web and Shelob from Lord of the Rings). The spider creates, weaves and makes networks. The story I told of my previous release of the spider was something I’m trying to rationalise to the woman as normal even though a part of me cringed at  how others may perceive it, as if creativity (feminine creativity?) is something dangerous, weird, and to be feared.

It’s possible that as more time passes (and if anyone has input to add) I’ll see more meanings and layers to this dream, but the rate at which I dream makes it hard to say that I’ll revisit. Some themes do repeat themselves in my dreams, and I like to think they don’t repeat once I figure them out, or they cease in relevance. For this particularly odd dream, the feminine and masculine symbols were so in my face (seriously, penii) as to make me examine it in this fashion, and to me, this interpretation makes some sense. The other dreams I’d had lately included dragons (masculine) and mermaids (feminine), unicorns (masculine) and maidens (feminine)–such gendered symbols as to make me think my subconscious may have been trying to bring something in this vein to my attention.