A dream: April 26, 1992

I found this dream recorded in my journal:

I was with two friends.  They were inside buying a ticket.  I was outside on the pavement, wearing denim shorts, a gray T-shirt, a red silky belt.  There was a group of teenagers standing in a cluster listening to good music, good beat.  I started dancing with great joy, abandon.  I didn't care how I looked, didn't care if anyone was looking. 

We were on a roadway of some sort.  I was lost in the dance, alone.  I noticed then that there were three women on a bench.  One was black.  She stood up, smiling and told me I looked lovely dancing.

I became conscious then, briefly, of myself--thinking I must look ridiculous in shorts, legs too fat.  Then I began to feel very happy.  I ran down the center of the road, still dancing, feeling light and buoyant.  

When I stopped, a little black girl was sprinting down the same road.  She was barely old enough to walk, yet she was running unbelievably fast.  She froze, suspended over the yellow line.  I asked the woman, "Your daughter?"

"Yes, she's an Olympic runner."

I looked at the little girl and said, "You move as fast as light.  I'm going to call you Light Beam.  Sun Bream."

She stayed there in suspended animation.  Everyone was happy.  "Hug your mother every day," I told her.

Reading this dream, I think of the way Jungian analysis treats characters in a dream: everyone represents some aspect of yourself.  The old woman and the little girl might represent old and young aspects of my psyche in 1992.

Black suggests a soulfulness that I've always sensed in people of color.  Some older version of me, the most soulful self, seemed to be telling the self-conscious "fat" young woman that she had a certain beauty when she moved--and maybe that her younger self could run way faster than she knew?