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 stool at a candlelit bar and fall into conversation with a chic, 80 year old woman. We are giggling, physically pressed together, and unbothered. She begins complimenting my youth and beauty. I immediately tell her I love her long, thick, red hair. It matched her lipstick shade perfectly.
As I'm complementing her, I realize this woman is not the same person I was originally talking to. She’s becoming younger little by little. My instincts screamed at me. I subtly move away from her side and she grabs my arm to remain in contact. With our final look, we both knew I had figured it out.
In that moment, the crowd turns their attention to me.
I am exposed and vulnerable. Oblivious to my fear, Jim dutifully follows me out of the house and onto our horses. In full gallop, we evade the people now hunting me. I strategically lead us through backyards and alleys since their cars would catch us on the main roads.
| The Post
Initially, I took this dream as the woman stealing my youth and me not having the right tools to evade the hunters. I extrapolated that this dream was telling me to leave my relationship.
It wasn’t until two years later that I learned about dreams having multiple, simultaneous meanings making it impossible to determine when a dream is fully unpacked. Freud called this ‘overdeterminism’.
Admittedly, I was a little ashamed of how I painted 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.
She was in my dreams to tell me to embrace my wild nature, to see her wild, red, alluring hair as passion and beauty and fire.
She was reflecting back to me what was coming from me.
Her youth and vitality were from my source, and I was not able to stand it. I was not able to meet my own luminosity without fleeing. In that moment I was not ready to be reborn and take on new life. So I fled.
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 offer it to the world.
This was my wake up call. 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 nature, and their 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"
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.