Butterfly Dance
I was sick last night with fever. I didn't see it coming, and I was knocked off my feet by it. I was in bed from about 5:30 yesterday afternoon until almost 10:30 this morning. All night long, I had fitful dreams about butterflies, of all things.
I don’t necessarily believe that your dreams are always significant although they certainly can be, especially if you choose to see them as important. I don’t subscribe to Freud’s idea that dreams are wish-fulfillments and certainly not that they are consistently the result of repressed or frustrated sexual desires. But I do think our dreams are a kind of window into our subconscious minds.
In the first of my dreams, I was talking to a woman for whom I used to work and as we talked, we were descended upon by huge black butterflies. They were painted with fluorescent streaks of yellow and blue, just tiny tidbits of color, but so bright. They landed on our fingers and hands and elbows and we contorted our bodies to ease their way across us. We felt blessed by them.
Then I was seated at an outdoor coffee shop, much like Joe's on Congress. There was a faceless man sitting next to me. He had striking blue eyes and he wore a uniform. We told stories and laughed out loud, sipped our coffee, and then put our cups down on a table made entirely of butterflies. The table moved and morphed, it was high then low, round then square, big then small, but our coffee never spilled.
Then I was in the tree house that my grandfather built for me when I was a girl. I was having a butterfly tea party. I was even wearing butterfly wings. The two previous dreams kind of came together here. The woman was there with her black butterflies and she was hosting us, giving us a lecture and explaining all about butterflies: how they eat and how they mate and how long they live.
My grandfather was there. He announced that for the tea party, his play name would be Goobersnapper and that for fun, we should all choose names that the butterflies couldn't pronounce.
The uniformed man was there. He was surrounded by orange and yellow butterflies that danced around him and landed on him when they needed to rest. He brought his own very large coffee mug made of tiny peach-colored butterflies and he told a long and entertaining story about the inadequacies of tea cups and why he preferred coffee mugs. And when that story was done, I laughed so hard I rolled backwards and fell out of the tree house. As I was falling (I seemed to be falling forever) I felt very scared and I wanted the butterflies to all fly down and save me, to swoop underneath me and catch me and carry me back up to the tea party. But they didn't. So I slammed into the earth beneath the tree house and woke up startled, wet with sweat and freezing cold with the chills that come with fever.
I had a hard time going back to sleep after that, but I did eventually. I don't know what any of that means, of course. But it sure was beautiful. And up until the end, it had such a peaceful feeling to it. The butterflies had a lulling quality about them and I guess, given my sudden warm-bodied illness, it was comforting to have them at my little dream-world tea party.
When I was 26 years old, my friend Jean and I were talking about a party we had gone to the weekend before. It was an excellent party and I was at a time in my life when I was just coming out of my shell. I was just discovering myself as a social being and gaining confidence in myself as a woman. I had felt so socially awkward for my whole life, really, until then. Jean agreed the party was a great success and then she said the most pleasing thing to me. She said the best thing about the party was watching me do my "butterfly dance" in the back yard.
I couldn't believe she would say such a thing. I felt so flattered and embarrassed. It made me feel beautiful and delicate and important when I regularly felt invisible. It was probably the first time I realized how incredibly different your idea of yourself can be from the idea held by those who know you. Those two perspectives really have little to do with one another. A person's self-image can largely have nothing to do with reality. I wouldn't have characterized myself that way in a million years.
So I presume that the idea of a butterfly is very special and very personal to me, if not simply for the fact that they're just lovely creatures, then because I was in one moment given an unforgettable compliment and awakened to the sad reality that people usually do not see themselves the way others do, that our perception of ourselves is inherently distorted.
I don’t guess it does me any good in the long run to analyze this particular set of my dreams or any other, but I can't help but look hard at this one. It seems to me, at a minimum, to be overflowing with first-rate Freudian fodder.
I don’t necessarily believe that your dreams are always significant although they certainly can be, especially if you choose to see them as important. I don’t subscribe to Freud’s idea that dreams are wish-fulfillments and certainly not that they are consistently the result of repressed or frustrated sexual desires. But I do think our dreams are a kind of window into our subconscious minds.
In the first of my dreams, I was talking to a woman for whom I used to work and as we talked, we were descended upon by huge black butterflies. They were painted with fluorescent streaks of yellow and blue, just tiny tidbits of color, but so bright. They landed on our fingers and hands and elbows and we contorted our bodies to ease their way across us. We felt blessed by them.
Then I was seated at an outdoor coffee shop, much like Joe's on Congress. There was a faceless man sitting next to me. He had striking blue eyes and he wore a uniform. We told stories and laughed out loud, sipped our coffee, and then put our cups down on a table made entirely of butterflies. The table moved and morphed, it was high then low, round then square, big then small, but our coffee never spilled.
Then I was in the tree house that my grandfather built for me when I was a girl. I was having a butterfly tea party. I was even wearing butterfly wings. The two previous dreams kind of came together here. The woman was there with her black butterflies and she was hosting us, giving us a lecture and explaining all about butterflies: how they eat and how they mate and how long they live.
My grandfather was there. He announced that for the tea party, his play name would be Goobersnapper and that for fun, we should all choose names that the butterflies couldn't pronounce.
The uniformed man was there. He was surrounded by orange and yellow butterflies that danced around him and landed on him when they needed to rest. He brought his own very large coffee mug made of tiny peach-colored butterflies and he told a long and entertaining story about the inadequacies of tea cups and why he preferred coffee mugs. And when that story was done, I laughed so hard I rolled backwards and fell out of the tree house. As I was falling (I seemed to be falling forever) I felt very scared and I wanted the butterflies to all fly down and save me, to swoop underneath me and catch me and carry me back up to the tea party. But they didn't. So I slammed into the earth beneath the tree house and woke up startled, wet with sweat and freezing cold with the chills that come with fever.
I had a hard time going back to sleep after that, but I did eventually. I don't know what any of that means, of course. But it sure was beautiful. And up until the end, it had such a peaceful feeling to it. The butterflies had a lulling quality about them and I guess, given my sudden warm-bodied illness, it was comforting to have them at my little dream-world tea party.
When I was 26 years old, my friend Jean and I were talking about a party we had gone to the weekend before. It was an excellent party and I was at a time in my life when I was just coming out of my shell. I was just discovering myself as a social being and gaining confidence in myself as a woman. I had felt so socially awkward for my whole life, really, until then. Jean agreed the party was a great success and then she said the most pleasing thing to me. She said the best thing about the party was watching me do my "butterfly dance" in the back yard.
-"Do my what?"
--"Your butterfly dance. You kind of flit from person to person and they just wait for you to land on them, just to see what you're going to do..."
I couldn't believe she would say such a thing. I felt so flattered and embarrassed. It made me feel beautiful and delicate and important when I regularly felt invisible. It was probably the first time I realized how incredibly different your idea of yourself can be from the idea held by those who know you. Those two perspectives really have little to do with one another. A person's self-image can largely have nothing to do with reality. I wouldn't have characterized myself that way in a million years.
So I presume that the idea of a butterfly is very special and very personal to me, if not simply for the fact that they're just lovely creatures, then because I was in one moment given an unforgettable compliment and awakened to the sad reality that people usually do not see themselves the way others do, that our perception of ourselves is inherently distorted.
I don’t guess it does me any good in the long run to analyze this particular set of my dreams or any other, but I can't help but look hard at this one. It seems to me, at a minimum, to be overflowing with first-rate Freudian fodder.
Comments
She's a butterfly,
pretty as the crimson sky,
nothin's ever going bring her down.
And, everywhere shes goes,
everybody knows,
she's so glad to be alive...
She's a butterfly...
Happy fluttering, my friend.
There's my Freud for ya.
Wow, you’ve got an amazing ability to recall your dreams. Do you write them down when you wake?
Isn’t it great to discover who we are and what we are about? Great story about your butterfly dance. Being a psyc major, I’ll be the first one to tell you that the best one to interpret any dream is yourself. The significance of a dream is only relevant to the person who is having it and the way that they construe their world. Books that suggest meaning for different symbols are nothing more than hokie pokie magic.
Dan