I dreamed a dream I hated. I did not even wish to record it. But I did, prefacing it with the following comment:

Jung said he felt it his privilege to reject recording dreams that were banal or vulgar. I feel the same right and wanted to do it to the following; however something in me prevents it. I regard it as ugly; however it can hardly be said that I have the experience to judge.

I was about fourteen years old when the dream began. I felt shy and clumsy. I found myself living in a peculiar house filled with garish cubicle rooms. Tacked up all over the walls were glossy color photographs taken of me when I was ten to twelve years of age. As I looked at them, they reminded me of brothel pinups. In some, I had been posed out in the country against lovely skies. In others, I wore a red brocade Chinese robe. In my opinion, I was much too young for such a sophisticated costume--and yet there was something very touching about it. As I got a closer look at the photos, I realized they were not at all like cheap pinups. There was great beauty in them. (My father, it seems, had taken them.) .

...except for some idiotic expressions and fish-eye stares, I looked very fresh and sweet posed on beds and sitting in a chair.

But then I was an adult in the dream. I was still inside the same house full of ugly cubicles. A movie producer was expected momentarily. I wondered if I was still as talented as I had been in childhood. I was in a dark hall full of dusty mirrors. I heard the doorbell ring in another part of the house and knew it must be the producer. That only gave me a moment or two to take a good look at myself in the mirrors.

I was naked then and much breastier than in real life. All around me on the dark walls were the childhood glossies, but in the dusty mirrors I could see that I was more beautiful as a woman. I stuck out my breasts, strutting. I struck a sexy pose. "I'll bet lots of photographers would love to photograph the new me," I thought. I was admiring the well-proportioned lines of my body until I saw, to my disgust, that there were pimples all down my back and torso. It made me sick to look at them. My whole front torso was larger than life in the gray, dusty mirror-and covered with:

....those hateful skin outbreakings.

The scene changed then and I found myself in the center of the house full of cubicles and winding halls. The bathroom was at the center and my parents had just locked me out of it. I heard a dream narrator comment:

"And now for the first time she learned about sex and was surprised."

. . . a feeling of "Even here--garbage!" came over me.

I found the dream distasteful and ugly, but I began to see a deeper significance in it as I wrote it out. I was "glossing over" an area of my childhood, the dream warned, and there was a great deal of childhood "garbage" that needed to be faced. But in 1963 my childhood did not interest me. My more immediate problem was my present with all its broken hopes. At first, the dream had seemed to be saying that my unconscious was cheap and trite and not at all like the minds with which Jung had worked. But as I wrote out that dream, despite missing the childhood gloss job, I did at least catch a gentle message of hope:

In general, I would say the dream means that in spite of sordid, ugly surroundings, there is "promise" in me. Things like dusty mirrors and garbage and pimples must be accepted and recognized--then cleaned out.

SOURCE: Journey of a Dream Animal by Kathleen Jenks (1975), pp. 80-82

EDITOR'S NOTE

I no longer ignore dreams that seem trivial, banal or vulgar. What I've learned is, if I record those, whether or not they ever reveal more (and they often do, on reflection), my dream recall improves and they get intenser. If I ignore 'trivial' dreams, my recall stays poor and the content stays dull.

Dreams, like anyone, dislike playing to an indifferent audience.

--Chris Wayan