The Woman Who Stole My Youth | The Dream
My bf, Jim Halpert, and I are on a night tour of an open house. I settle into a barstool at a candle lit bar and fall into conversation with a chic 80 year old woman. We are giggling, huddled together, unbothered and sharing an intimate moment, physically pressed together. She begins complimenting my youth and beauty. Deflecting the complement, I immediately tell her i love her long, thick, red hair. It matches her lipstick shade perfectly.
As I'm complementing her, I realize this woman is not the same person i was originally talking to. She was becoming younger little by little. My instincts told me I was not safe. I subtly moved out from her side and she grabbed my arm to remain in contact. With that final eye contact, we both knew i had figured it out.
The crowd turned their attention to me and I didn't feel comfortable being seen by them. Oblivious to my fear, Jim dutifully followed me out of the house and onto our horses. We were in full gallop, trying to evade people now hunting me. I had to be strategic by leading us through backyards and alleys since their cars would catch us on the main roads.
The Woman Who Stole My Youth | The Post
This dream came to me in April 2022 and I understood it as a battle cry for my freedom. I saw it through the eyes of someone taking from me, as the title suggests.
It wasn't until two years later that I learned about dreams having multiple, simultaneous meanings. Freud called this ‘overdeterminism’.
At first, I thought I had misinterpreted the dream the first time around. I was a little ashamed of my painting of the older woman as the villain. I now see her in a new light.
She is my Baba Yaga. She came to me to reflect the wild woman in me. In this new era of my life, I saw the dream not as a depletion of my beauty and vitality, but a testament, a manifestation of the power pouring from me. I realized there was no 'evidence' in the dream of me feeling older, like she was sucking the youth from me.
Baba Yaga shows up in dreams to wake women up from their monotony.
This dream wake me up from my own misalignment and spurred perspective shifts:
In 2022 that meant: facing the wild and raw potential the world had in store for me.
In 2024 that meant: facing the wild, creative, and raw potential I had in myself and to offer to the world.
In 2024 it was my wake up call, my indicator that I had shifted into a new self-concept. My questioning the interpretation of that dream was the first inklings that a significant shift had taken place in my development. I saw the world in a new way. I had a new subconscious programming running in the background. At the time I thought that invalidated my initial interpretation. I thought I had simply grown up to see the *true* meaning.
Then I learned a dream can have multiple meanings, even when they seem contradictory. That's the beauty of dreams, their multi-dimensionality, their ever-morphing, ever-changing, ever-revealing, ever-lasting relevance.
You will never outgrow a dream. The dream grows up with you. It matures along side your psyche.
“The discovery of seemingly contradictory insights into the meanings of a dream is always an indication that your life is moving into a radically new phase.”
- Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill"
And in 2022 it was my wake up call to live my life as my own, to live in alignment with my wild aspirations. In 2024, I realized that wild passion was actually coming from me, it wasn’t something to find. It wasn’t some external thing to be chased then experienced. It was in me all along.
Of course it only took quitting my corporate job, moving across the ocean for a few months to come into this perspective.
I really do love this notion. That dreams can grow up with you. That previous meanings shouldn't be dismissed but are rather a snapshot of your programming, your inner world, your feelings at that time and space. They should be honored because you can see your journey through your dreams.
There is power in the rediscovery of an old dream. In another two years or twenty years, who knows what different meanings will come from your rich, beautiful dreams.