There is a lot of sex in this dream – I’ll spare you the details. That’s what your imagination is for!
I appear to be in a wife-swapping situation. It is a sleepover, a party for a dozen friends, a pleasant location, a bright, white, Mediterranean-like apartment. My only focus for most of the dream is a young woman (I too am a young man in the dream) whom I do not recognise at all. We enjoy each other’s company and bodies. It is very relaxed, even though I’m in this most unfamiliar situation of doing this around others, not a crowd, a friend and I think or presume my wife is somewhere too! We’re on or under crisp white sheets, on a vast mattress that takes four adults, or in a side room, on a smaller bed, but never truly private. At some point, the young woman I was with goes off. She comes back and is clearly upset. And dressed. After a moment seeing her husband isn’t aware of her distress she gravitates towards me for a hug rather than her husband.
Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye, I have seen a woman who is getting non of the attention others are getting. It is like she has not been chosen. She stands, politely, naked. She is either skinny, or I notice more than one or a couple of bony protrusions on he chest and hip – as if it is a small deformity. Although I comfort the woman I have been with all evening, my mind keeps turning to this person standing patiently in the middle of the room.
For a moment, I think sex with my male friend is a possibility, though he politely declines with the line ‘I have to be up early in the morning’ (This despite the fact we have been up most of the night and are on holiday). Maybe I was gravitating toward him as a distraction from what I knew I was going to do: go to the woman in the middle of the room. And so ends the dream. However, I have been reading about Active Imagination, and it is the next step after an analysis of the dream that intrigues me.
A Fuller Jungian Reading
What strikes me now is how little this dream is actually concerned with sex. Sexuality provides the stage, but the drama being enacted upon it concerns relationship, acceptance, vulnerability and recognition.
The setting itself is important. The apartment is youthful, perhaps in its early thirties if it were a person. It is emotionally open, almost spiritual, and entirely at ease with itself. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is furtive. There is no sense of guilt, jealousy or transgression. It is a place where people appear as they are.
In the dream I feel far younger. I feel ageless, weightless, almost like an astronaut. Free. At ease. Able simply to enjoy the moment. Looking back on it now, the feeling is beautiful and comforting, like a bundle of freshly laundered clothes. There is something homely about it despite the unusual circumstances. The dream begins in a psychic territory that feels healed rather than conflicted.
The first woman attracts my attention because she is unknown.
The second woman is slim, perhaps even thin, with a couple of slight bone-like protrusions that make her subtly different. Yet what stands out most is not her appearance but her nature. She is stoical, patient, almost hang-dog in her quiet acceptance of herself.
My feeling is that she would have been interested in anyone who approached. The question was not whether she would choose someone, but who would treat her sympathetically enough to discover who she really was. Who would seek out the connection beneath the surface. I felt that I could do that.
Even now, if she walked into the room, I would not rush towards a sexual encounter. She strikes me as someone who would need time. There would be more to her than that. The desire is not conquest but understanding.
This becomes clearer when the emotional centre of the dream arrives.
The woman who returns upset is not my wife but another man’s woman, though through the fluid dream logic of the gathering relationships seem capable of shifting and evolving. She returns distressed and could have sought comfort from her husband. Instead she turns towards me.
What matters is my reaction.
The feeling is tenderness and a desire to step in without overstepping the mark. The social agreement within the dream appears to be that people are offering one another sexual encounters, not emotional support. Yet emotional support proves far more significant.
Comforting her carries more weight than the erotic relationship. I would not deny her what she wanted physically, but what is happening here feels more important. It is the formation of a genuine emotional connection. The dream repeatedly places emotional intimacy above physical intimacy.
Then we come to the figure who increasingly feels like the true centre of the dream.
The young woman standing quietly in the middle.
If the others belong psychologically to their early thirties, she seems younger, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Less worldly wise. Less experienced. She is not ashamed. Quite the opposite.
She is waiting.
Her attitude is almost: “My turn will come. Pick me. I am being open. I dare to show myself like this to everyone. This is me.”
She is taking an enormous psychological risk. She is making herself visible.
The slight irregularity in her body feels important. It is not disability. It is not damage. It is vulnerability. Difference. Something outside the norm. Something subtly otherworldly.
I recognise this quality from the Watersprite figures I have imagined creating. They often possess some small deviation from ordinary humanity: a joint, a bone spur, a slight alteration that marks them as belonging partly to another realm.
This woman carries exactly that quality.
She is not flawed. She is unique.
The powerful emotional fact is that I know I will approach her, especially if nobody else does. I could not bear the thought of her becoming tearful or discouraged after making such an authentic attempt to be seen.
What moves me is not desire but compassion.
I want her to be recognised.
I want her openness to be rewarded.
I want her to experience what she came for: connection, acceptance, participation, growth.
At this point the dream begins to resemble a classic Jungian encounter with an undeveloped or neglected aspect of the psyche. Not because she is female, but because she embodies qualities that have not yet been fully welcomed into consciousness: vulnerability, authenticity, difference, patience, and the courage to reveal oneself without guarantees of acceptance.
The final figure, the male friend, provides an interesting counterpoint.
Unlike the others, he belongs to waking reality. The approach is sexual in character, recalling the exploratory intimacy that can occur among boys in early adolescence. Yet his response is oddly mundane.
“I have to be up early in the morning.”
The line is almost comic.
It is such an ordinary excuse that it feels symbolic. It is life, responsibility, routine, practicality, timing.
Not rejection, merely postponement.
His refusal becomes a blessing in disguise because it redirects attention toward the waiting girl. In Active Imagination, that is exactly what happens. I approach her instead.
And there she proves charming.
She comes readily out of her shell. She is intelligent. Slightly eccentric. An oddball.
Exactly the kind of person who has always attracted me.
Viewed as a whole, the dream appears less concerned with sexuality than with a recurring pattern in my life: being drawn towards the overlooked, the unusual, the vulnerable and the authentic. Again and again, the dream steers me away from excitement and towards connection; away from novelty and towards understanding; away from possession and towards recognition.
The deepest question may not be “Who are these women?” but rather:
What part of myself is represented by the one standing quietly in the centre, waiting to be chosen, hoping that someone will see beyond appearances and recognise her true value?
The striking possibility is that the dreamer and the waiting woman are mirrors of one another. The quality that moves me in her may be the very quality within myself that has always longed to be recognised, welcomed and understood.
One thing I would explore next through Active Imagination is whether the waiting woman has a name, a home, a history, or a purpose. Jung often found that when such a figure is approached respectfully, she stops being a symbol and begins to speak as a personality in her own right. That conversation may reveal far more than further interpretation.
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