Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Who's That Girl?

Blissfully cool temps gave way overnight to hard rain, colder temps and now heavy fog tonight, but not as cold.
Sometimes in dreams there is this person, or maybe an animal, that is being chased, or even attacked, or crouches somewhere in fear. Or maybe, in less tense circumstances, it's a little girl maybe wanting ice cream or a boy looking in a window. I learned several years ago (in counseling) that this dream character is called the 'dream ingenue' -- an archetypal figure that represents innocence (maybe lost innocence) or something similar in dreams. There was a period (a good ten years ago) where all my dream ingenues were dark-haired girls or young women. I always knew when she appeared who she was, or rather, what she represented to me. In the movie Moulin Rouge!, Nicole Kidman's character is the fallen "ingenue" of the writer's absinthe-influenced dream. He loses her in his dreamscape, and awakes a different man (grows a beard, gets a job with a newspaper). His waking romanticism was shallow (a struggling novelist in Paris), but his dream romance was real and tactile to him. When he lost "her" in the dream world, he awoke a sadder but wiser, and less innocent, man. I don't know if contact with the dream ingenue automatically means you're about to lose your innocence (I doubt it always means that, but it might), but I do think what the ingenue represents is worth considering when you (if you) reflect on your dreams. (As for animals, some I've met as "nature" ingenues were a small, maybe adolescent fox; a deer; and a dolphin.) Next time, another character you might meet in your dreams.



orig: 12/03/06 (estimate)

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