Dream #6: "Skid Row"

Classification: Type III
Age: Approximately twenty years old.

I am walking down a sidewalk on Skid Row (an area within Los Angeles inhabited by homeless people). It is night and the lights of the city shine with a surreal brilliance. All around me is the sound of the night: an instrument being played in some upstairs apartment, the shuffling of the homeless people going about their business, an occasional car or bus passing, an occasional honk or siren in the distance, an occasional cry in the night. It has rained recently; there are puddles everywhere.

Suddenly, I see a shining girl, dancing along the streets, accompanied by an unknown (female) friend. She is elusive, but I follow. We walk and dance around Skid Row for a time, always she is just around the corner, just across the street, just out of reach.

Without warning, a harlot sitting against a wall to my right reaches out her left hand and grabs my right wrist. My attention shifts dramatically as I stare into this unknown woman's eyes. She has "one of those faces," like a person who has known incredible pain, torment, and despair, a person who has persevered through immense trial. She says (as closely as I can now remember): "I was pregnant. They took it out of me so I could work. The beat me until it came out; then they cut it up with knives. They put the pieces in a bag and threw it in a dumpster. I had to dig to find it. I can still hear it screaming for a moment. That was all it had." I look down into her lap and see that she is cradling a black bag in her arms, blood still seeping out and a tiny hand clutched in her fingers.

Interpretation:

This dream defines a paradigm shift. The obsession with the Anima figure represented by or representative of a particular acquaintance of mine is in this case assaulted by the appearance of another concept of importance. The charge of the psyche is that the obsession is inappropriate to the extent that it excludes other matters of equal or possibly greater importance.