Gender dysphoric dreaming
Last month I wrote that a lot of old “about me’s” would appear here which came from my old Pages from Sages blog.
Yesterday in the closing part of the ‘About AboutAlexa.lgbt‘ post I said I’d write a special piece and I think it indeed is quite special (to me at least.)
You might have noticed that I have added an old post of 2011 called ‘A (wo)man is allowed to dream‘ (I had to add ‘wo’ there for obvious reasons 😉). It was back then that I didn’t dream at all other than a couple of times a year.
It was a couple of months after my bipolar diagnosis and start of the valporic acid medication when I noticed a couple of changes to my mental health. I know, that’s what the medication was intended for, but these changes were ‘just’ side effects. One of them was that I started to dream again. At first a couple of times a month and by now almost daily.
There are quite some recurring dreams of which I believe they are memories of previous lives, but those are not the ones I want to talk about. It’s the ones where dreams are related to my gender dysphoria and for that I will give you yesterday’s dream as example.
I was in a restroom and a very luxury one. The kind of restroom you see in expensive hotels or warehouses (Harrods in the UK or De Bijenkorf here in The Netherlands). I don’t know what I am wearing, by I know I am dressed for the occasion (whatever the occasion might be).
There is also an other lady in the restroom, she is about 55 to 60 years old and very pretty and charismatic. She has natural blonde hair with some silvery-gray ones showing her age and she wears a very stylish (and expensive) ivory lady’s suit with high black heels. She just looks very good! 😍
I stand before the mirror of the sink, doing my makeup. She has taken notice of me and sees me for the woman I am.
All of a sudden a man comes in the restroom and the both of us are a bit startled, as is he. The woman is the first to recover and asks him what he is doing here. He apologizes saying that he picked the wrong restroom by accident. I at the same time wonder if I took the correct restroom and become very insecure of myself 🙁
For ‘normal’ people this might seem totally no problem and a ‘regular’ dream. For me, having gender dysphoria, it quite had an impact on me. Not only during the dream and the fact that I woke up immediately, but also the next day (which was yesterday). The dream made me pretty depressed for most of the following day.
Today having a good day without dysphoric dreams last night. That made it quite easy for me to write the post. I hope you ‘enjoyed’ it and more importantly understand how much impact a dream might have.
With love Alexa 💋
