Dream beheading redux.

It's been a month since my last dream entry about the beheading of Ariana Grande.

If you've taken a look at my older posts, such macabre dreams aren't new--I recalled before that I was only nine when I dreamt of a rogue militant group called K-19--and they're rather infrequent. They're intriguing nonetheless, for the obvious reasons. So I thought I'd bring up a dream I had three years ago, which was more random and intense than the Ariana Grande dream.

The dream played a bit like a prime-time drama, taking place on U of L's campus, on a cloudy winter day. I was the observer in this dream as well. I watched as a young female student, about in her late teens or early twenties, walking across the parking lot near the bank and the Playhouse Theater. I wasn't sure where she was going, but it seemed she was headed for the bookstore.

Suddenly, she looked up and saw an unidentifiable figure in front of her, and had a look of fear on her face. After that the dream skipped scenes, and the next thing I saw was the girl's headless body flailing around and convulsing as it moved toward the bookstore, where it banged against the window and fell back on the ground to its death. I saw the gruesome action from inside the bookstore, where others noticed the flailing body and panicked.

I remember posting this on DreamMoods, and got quite a bit of interesting feedback. I wrote that the dream had reminded me of a Wikipedia article about three Indonesian girls who were ambushed and beheaded on the way to school back in 2005, which I mentioned in the DreamMoods post. (Here's an article from BBC News.)

I recall that one person responded to me with some pretty good insight:

"You mention reading a similar story on online...It is very possible the story shook you at an emotional level that you were not aware of while awake and the dream was expressing the true depth of horror you did not entirely experience while awake. I find that through out the day, there are moments that push little emotional triggers, sometimes they are fleeting moments like whispers and thoughts that go in one ear and out the other, and then they decompress at night. Usually for me the last dream I have before I wake up is directly relevent to an emotional trigger of the previous day. 

"symbolicly[sic], there are two things in common - 1) the school setting 2) the decapitation. It is an image of denied education, of intellectual oppression etc... At an emotional level, there is the horror of the violence of the denial itself, but then their is also the grief of joyfully being on the way to school to make something of oneself and then forcibly being denied that right/ yerning[sic]. 

"I think the story you read not only wounded our altruistic sense of humanity, but also feminist instincts."--name of poster withheld

It made good sense to me at the time. I have long identified as a feminist, and at the time, I was dissatisfied with what was going on at the government level--particularly the Republican party's desire to strip away women's reproductive rights and overturn Roe v. Wade. I was worried that because so many people hated President Obama (and still hate him), a president might be elected that year who would allow those dangerous restrictions to become the law of the land.

I was also worried about the novel I was writing. It embraces an issue that is very important to me, as it is to many self-identifying feminists, and I was concerned about how I could best convey my message to a reading audience. The events in Washington fueled my desire to keep writing my story. Still, the story was fragmented (as first drafts actually should be), and being an aspiring author, I let the process confuse me. Add that to my obligations regarding school, work, and life in general.

So I guess you could say I was taking "sudden hits from all directions"--the nature of an ambush.

Three years later, I still haven't finished my first draft, as life eventually got in the way. But I haven't given up. Women's rights are still on the line more than ever, as Republicans have now taken both the House and the Senate. It's more important than ever that I finish my story.

I'm starting to think that the Ariana Grande and the young woman in the 2012 dream may be one and the same in the archetypal sense--they may both represent that young, fresh new aspect of myself that is being destroyed in each of these dreams, first by multiple responsibilities and worries at once, and then by my own personal confidence issues.

I have a feeling that this year will be a year of significant change and introspection. I believe that in spite of their dark nature, these dreams are pointing me in a direction toward something amazing, and I have a lot of work to do. Just writing this is inspiring me to get up and make something happen.