Dear Caco-Bot and Anya:
Let me first say that I am assigned at birth a man who mostly “presents” as a man — nerdy dude in masculine clothing, mostly dirty and unkempt. I also have a Fundamentalist Evangelical background featuring a lot of neglect, emotional abuse, and “religious trauma” (as the saying goes these days), so keep that in mind. However, I was a much different type of person in THIS dream.
In the dream, I was a rail thin but very attractive goth girl with a carefully calculated and maintained appearance. I wore black coordinated clothing, dark facial makeup, and stylish shoes with a close-cropped (but pristine) hairstyle. I got the impression I was sort of a misanthropic tech wizard like Lizbeth Salander in the Dragon Tattoo series of novels. However I was a bit of a kink — under my clothing (to maintain a professional demeanor on the surface while appealing to the counter-culture in my private life) I had nipple rings and elaborate tribal tattoos.
In the dream, I was chosen to serve as network security and audiovisual support for a meeting of the minds between traditional Catholic factions and traditional Fundamentalist Baptist factions. I thought the purpose of the meeting was to navigate complex social and economic politics, but when I got there it seemed like everyone was more interested in networking, brown-nosing and showing off their clothes. I began to badmouth the participants to the parishioners, asking them exactly who we were there to impress. Ourselves? Each other? God? And I even drilled deep down into the contradiction between meetings like this and our ostensibly compassionate social policies.
Well, come to find out one of the Catholic bishops who facilitated the meet overheard my objections and raised them to the representing Catholic priest AND the Baptist minister in attendance. These two men got into such an all out row over their disagreements regarding my objections, the relationship fell apart and both men decided never to associate with each other again. Then a low level church flunkie pulled me before him in a cluttered office and demanded to know why I — as a guest, and member of neither church — felt I had the gall to disrupt the meet’s proceedings. He said I would have been better off to keep my mouth shut — and now I would be “punished.”
I laughed and told him to go “fuck himself,” he can handle his own technical equipment if I’m so awful, and stalked away from the beachfront property where the meet was being held to return to my dingy little apartment in the city center. However, before I got there, two men in black clothing (I assume one from each church) accosted me in the dark and seized me. They stripped all my clothing — even my socks and shoes — revealing my kinky rings and tattoos, shaming me, and condemning me all at the same time. I remember my male personality floating nearby, observing my nude abuse, and becoming mildly titillated. Then they beat me with the belt buckles they had stripped from their waists until I collapsed, unconscious.
What do YOU think this dream “means?”