Complexes/Femme Invisibility

Last night I had a dream where I was at some sort of summer camp and all the lesbians I've ever known were outside playing/having sex/joking around/whatever in the water trough/pool area outside. I felt hurt, embarrassed, left out. My friend Lauren was with them even though she's always been straight and since we were the closest, I joked with her first, calling across the courtyard.

"Lauren, what the hell?" I tried to laugh. "Did you think I wasn't cool enough to invite or something?"

She looked at the girl next to her and then smiled at me, "We thought you were busy otherwise we totally would have invited you." She swam to the edge of the pool near me and I knelt down in front of her. I could feel them, all of them, staring at us while their hands skimmed along skin under the water.

"I can handle it," I assured Lauren, and then out of desperation and anxiety and fear I grabbed her and kissed her quickly. I felt nauseated. I wasn't attracted to her and everyone knew it. She was my friend, my good friend, and instead of making myself fit in I was just floundering further, drowning in the sea of manipulative games and subcultures and titles. Lauren looked at me - angrily, harshly, and I tried to backtrack. "Look, this doesn't mean you're gay or that I like you, I just-" I tried to explain that I wanted to prove myself but she cut my off.

"I don't know what you take me for," I'd never heard her so cold and harsh, "but I'm not gay. And if I were, I'd definitely go for the pretty femmes." I recoiled. Which you're not was implied in her sentence. I'd never been attached to the title of femme, but the way she tore it from me left me reeling - empty handed and wanting to cry.

I feel this a lot. I feel this all the time. Constantly defending and proving and feeling like my sexuality is not broadcast clearly enough. Constantly feeling as though "lesbian" is an exclusive club to which I am not invited or wanted. Constantly aggravated because I'm subjected to male gaze and overtures while easily passed over by lesbians and dismissed as less than or an outsider.

Maybe I'm not femme, but Femme Invisibilty seems to apply to me so easily.

I understand that it is my own shortcomings and brainwashings and past manipulations that have given me this not enough complex, but just because I know that doesn't make it go away. It's a trend in all my writings - not enough - and I'm trying so hard to tamp that down but then it rears up in dreams like this and I know it's still plaguing me.

Dreams

Many people don't put any stock in dreams. There are a few who take their dreams literally, as premonitions or an opening to some understanding that their consciousness could not receive during wakeful hours. I fall somewhere in the middle - receptive to the ideas and themes inside my dreams but aware that some may just be folly.

The wonky meds have been influencing my dreams a lot. I had one the other day where I was married to a man, screaming and crying and shouting my protestations that I was a lesbian, but he was adamant that by tying me down and dying my hair I would become straight and docile. Then another, in the shower,  a pretty girl softly and gently washing my hair under the spray of the shower as she nipped at my neck and her skin slid wetly across mine. Then another, this morning, curled up with my head against a thickly beating heart as my hair was brushed away from my face, and the steady fingers continued down my back before starting again at my temple.

Do you see the pattern? So I looked it up and this is what I got:
"If feelings of satisfaction or contentment accompany the dream, this likely indicates welcome, positive change. Since hair is inextricably linked with image, a positive feelings also indicate an image upgrade. If the dream feels disturbing, it symbolizes damage to self-image. Negative salon [cutting or dying] dreams can be interpreted as symbols of unwanted or undesired change or they may be intuitive urgings that a contemplated change will be disastrous.

Hair is not only an image symbol, it is also a sex symbol. Women especially use hair to increase their sexual attractiveness. Some women also play with their hair when trying to attract attention of the opposite [or same] sex. For a woman, dreams about playing with her hair can indicate a playful attitude toward sexuality or a desire for attention. Dreams of long, healthy dream hair are representative of confidence, power, contentment, and spiritual, mental, and physical well-being."

Shocker? No, I feel like my dreams were pretty forthcoming. I do find it interesting that there are enough people who have these dreams that certain things become symbolic and our psyches can use them at will. For me, hair is also comforting, a soothing gesture at the end of a long day, something to ease my pain when I'm ill, a way for people to get close without me feeling self-conscious.

Perhaps I miss that comfort because I'm sick, or perhaps it's a whole bunch of other things :) but for the most part they've been very good dreams.

Perfume/Dreams

I sprayed her perfume on my pillow. My mother used to spray lavender on my pillow before bed to help me sleep during the years that I had horrible night terrors. Of course it never worked, and now I have an aversion toward the scent.

Last night I had a nightmare, and the only scent that has nothing but good memories attached to it is the smell of her perfume. Maybe that makes me creepy, but I just want to have good dreams tonight.

The only problem is that now my bed smells like her. Her scent is intoxicating, inebriating. It clouds my judgment until I can think of nothing but her and the time I spent with her in her apartment. She'd never been in my bed. There was no reason for it to smell like her. But now it does, and I am stuck drinking her in. It's like sweet torture.

Maybe it's not as creepy because she is not my ex, she is attracted to girls, and she does know I am interested in her and is possibly interested in me. Or maybe I am only justifying this for myself.

If you would have dreamed the nightmare I had last night, you would understand my desperation for a change in environment.