I'm at a 24-hour Psychodrama marathon. One by one, audience members go onstage and act out scenes from their lives, amping them up, exploring them, switching roles... and usually, in the end, breaking down in tears or exploding with rage or joy. Insight on insight, on and on...

By morning we're emotionally limp, so the director calls for a break. The others all walk down the hall. I go last and find them in a little ice rink, skating! Takes me a while to find skates because they're in a bin, unpaired. Pull out several wrong for me: 1) low shoes without ankle support (unassertive wimpiness?) 2) Traditional Inuit women's hip-boots, bit and awkward (constricted by female role?) 3) Pointy toe shoes like my friend Wally's (normality, conformity?). At last, an adequate but not great-fitting pair... (psychodrama crowd?)

Two areas are roped off, one for beginners, the other advanced. I don't know where I fit. Beginners get open ice--more room, but no help. I haven't skated in years, but I want to be pushed by skilled teachers, so I try the advanced side. It's narrow, split into aisles with fjordy ice-tongues between tall shelves, like some glacial supermarket. As I go down one, a guy sweeping it says nastily "thanks for scratching up the ice I just smoothed!" I want this guy off my back so I say "I'm sorry" though I think "Why didn't you fence it off or put a sign up if it's reserved?" He says "You're not sorry, you don't care at all." Quite true. But he succeeds in intimidating me; I go back toward the beginners' side where it's dull but safe.

I see a newcomer among the skaters out in crowds on the main ice, a man with a baseball bat rolled in bright cloth, like a parody of a hockey player. But no skates on! Round him a mock hockey game starts. Develops into a real shoving match, then a fight, then a full riot. Half the Men's Group and the entire Psychodrama Workshop swinging bats and clubs. Hard. Thunk! Broken bones and concussions for sure.

I retreat to a small side aisle and watch. Slowly the war subsides. Gonna be some sick, sore shrinks for weeks. One or two others are in the room with me; they mutter and glare at me as if I'm contemptible for staying out of the fight (but they're not? Hypocrites!)

All quiet now. Safe yet? I don't know quite why, but I roll up a poster and roll it across the ice as a test. Men get up and come at me, yelling "GET THAT COWARD, THAT TRAITOR!" Soon a whole mob is after me. Four Afghanis, the nearest men, surround me--give me no chance to challenge the accusation. As they start to attack and I realize I have no way out, someone says matter-of-factly "sometimes people JUST GET KILLED." Well I still have two escapes, though I feel they're cheating: I can go lucid and give myself powers, or I could just wake up.

Reluctantly, I wake, feeling ashamed...

For not letting them clobber me.

1980 NOTES

• Ice rink = a "social swim," but here it's ice-cold!
• Skates better fit = your social role must fit the nature of your sole/soul!
• Therapists riot = psychodrama WAS like hockey--they played for blood. And the core group of therapists in our psychodrama troupe went beyond machismo; they scorned me for protecting myself, call it resistance. Well, I AM resisting. I'm resisting idiocy.
• Ashamed to go lucid, feel lucid dreaming and waking up are just cheating, avoiding crucial issues = I'm starting to BELIEVE the put-downs from these radical therapists! Think I'm a coward. But their "game" breaks bones. They're a mob. They don't resolve issues--they just act out!

  The wrong crowd for me.

I hesitated to include this dream, but it dramatizes the issues raised many years later in Elaine Aron's book "The Highly Sensitive Person"--America's love of butch behavior, and its equal scorn for sensitive and femme types. The psychodrama group I was involved with grew out of the rowdy sixties counterculture around Stanford University; the director was a buddy of Ken Kesey's. This dream showed me that just as hippies were quite capable of sexism, the human potential movement suffered from America's anti-sensitive bias. They scorned it as middle-class.

Like bathing.

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