My initial Eureka Moment post for Yes Louisville explored the first dream I remembered, ever. The image of five women intertwined by creativity and beauty and peacefulness helped me compose a crucial scene in the screenplay I was writing.
Soon, another dream empowered pride and self-confidence in myself as a woman — despite family and cultural devaluations of women:
Mother dallies with my sisters. Now, it’s too late. Wellesley has accepted others. There is no place for me. My sister stands in front of our grandmother’s Rococo armchair upholstered in yellow silk brocade. A miniature china chair adorned with her grandmother’s sepia picture graces an antique curio. Aloud, I worry, “Someone could steal the chair.” Mother denies its importance; I insist on its worth. She finally agrees.
What wild women! My mother, a take-no-prisoners tennis player; my grandmother, a pioneer in a long skirt on clay courts; my great-grandmother, a correspondent for The New York Times. Yet, three generations of fierce women, ultimately caged by more relegating them to be the power behind the throne of their husbands.
Family folklore and a male-centric cultural ethos formed my ideas of women’s work. My father often pontificated, “Behind every successful man is a woman warning him he is wrong.” He advised I could support myself with a teaching degree if inevitable marriage failed.
The dream made clear my mother passed her damaged identity onto me. In the same dream, I saw a new image of myself—like my grandmother’s chair—bright, sunny, valuable, unique, and part of a proud female heritage.
The tableau evoked Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” an artistic ode to women of legendary accomplishment. Chicago made an installation of china plates painted with open flowers and embroidered napkins set on a triangular table, dramatic visual symbolism for the most intimate female physical feature and for the blossoming of female potential.
The iconic creation challenged a male-dominated art establishment and a society defining Chicago’s choices as a woman and an artist. “As long as women’s achievements were excluded from our understanding of the past, we would continue to feel as if we had never done anything worthwhile,” Chicago wrote in her autobiographical book “Through the Flower.”
The noble women of “The Dinner Party” from the Primordial Goddess to Eleanor of Aquitaine to Margaret Sanger speak. Instead of acquiescing to cultural devaluations of women, find merit in yourself.
I hope this dream narrative prompts you to listen to your dreams for self-confidence. Add a dose (15 repetitions 3 times a day) of affirmations derived from the message in your dream/s to prompt the blossoming of your true Self.
Read more about dreams, our inner GPS, in my book, “Dreams and the Wisdom Within,” available from my website JoyceLynn.com.
