Exercise: Feeling your inner existence apart from gender

In their play children often imaginatively interchange their sexes. The young selfhood is freer in its identification, and as yet has not been taught to identify its own personality with its sex exclusively.

In the dreams of children this same activity continues, so that the boy may have many dream experiences as a girl, and the girl as a boy. More than this, however, in children’s dreams as in their play activity, age variances are also frequent. The young child dreaming of its own future counterpart, for example, attains a kind of psychological projection into the future of its world. Adults censor many of their own dreams so that the frequent changes in sexual orientation are not remembered.

Play then at another game, and pretend that you are of the opposite sex. Do this after an encounter in which the conventions of sex have played a part. Ask yourself how many of your current beliefs would be different if your sex was. If you are a parent, imagine that you are your mate, and in that role imaginatively consider your children.

Your beliefs about dreams color your memory and interpretation of them, so that at the point of waking, with magnificent psychological duplicity, you often make last-minute adjustments that bring your dreams more in line with your conscious expectations. The sexual symbols usually attached to dream images are highly simplistic, for example. They program you to interpret your dreams in a given manner.

Give us a moment ... You do have a 'dream memory' as a species, with certain natural symbols. These are individually experienced, with great variations. The studies done on men and women dreamers are already prejudiced, however, both by the investigators and by the dreamers themselves. Men remember 'manly' dreams generally speaking, now - while women in the same manner remember dreams that they believe suit their sex according to their beliefs.

Nature of the Psyche
Session 795, Page 187