Dirty Jeans & Tampons

Gifts For Girls, Dream Tending

Beetle Woman is throwing birthday parties for girls of all ages. Her teal hair and face are the shell of a beetle’s body, and her black silhouette is svelte. Teal wings arc behind her. I’m marveling at her insect face is like a snow bunting in flight. She wears cool shades and vibes like Actias Luna among house moths. I wonder if I can cut my hair like hers when I have a vision (a dream within a dream) of me dying my hair her color. That’s when I realize—Beetle Woman is me.

The dream shifts from my role as Observer/Noter/Witness to Participant. I’ve become the dream.

I’m Beetle Woman, throwing a birthday party for Oldest Daughter. She’s 36, but in the dream, she’s turning 18. The vast party room is striking with silver and back decorations like a disco ball. Black flowers and wisteria drape elegantly about the space. Fathers are bringing their daughters of all ages to this Girl’s Celebration—a celebration of Girls. My son is there with his daughter. Everyone is jubilant.

Anytime I have an insect or flower dream, I pay attention. This dream contains both! Every Dream Tender establishes a Dream Council of mentors, guides, ancestors, and guardians. My Council contains two Dream Figures, Rickety Cricket and Primrose, a shift-changing hodag/calf who are my direct ancestral connections to Earth and Nature. I’m not a fan of bugs, well, I wasn’t until Insect Nation approached me in meditation the first time I ever tended a dream with my cohort. It remains a profound experience when Rickety Cricket opened my heart to the Insect Nation, giving me a glorious ride through my flower garden on the back of Bee. Primrose has a longer story I’ll spin another day, but flowers are her signature in dreams.

Thus, I’m excited to recognize living flowers. As more fathers arrive, they, too add flowers according to the colors their daughters like. Many men are asking about gifts—What to gift a girl? Beetle Woman pulls out a list with one gift per year highlighted for each birthday including Newly Born. Year 18 lists a subset of gifts beneath the words, “If she hasn’t received these by 18, include:” On the top of the subset list is, “a. dirty jeans and tampons.” A tune is playing over and over, replacing the lyrics to “Love and Marriage” with “Jeans and Tampons.” I wake up, attempting to hold onto the lingering interconnectedness of the Beetle Woman’s Dream.

In the mornings, I wake up when the dogs and husband do. My day starts quickly for a Dream Tender since my husband returned home from the hospital, needing more scheduled assistance. I’m learning to hold the dream thread while piddling dogs, fixing breakfast, and doling out the first of four rounds of pills. After he’s set, I return upstairs with coffee to return to bed with both dogs. Not to sleep, but to tend.

The thread stitches across the page of my Dream Journal. It doesn’t matter how many details you remember of a dream. It’s not even important to remember! Dreamtime matters. Interact with the tiniest detail and dreams will note your attention. As I’ve learned in my studies with Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, a Dream is a living image, not a static snapshot. To honor the life of a Dream, I record it as if it were happening (first person present tense POV for you writing craft nerds/grammarians). This way, when you return to the Dream to expand and engage, it still holds life and intelligence.

It feels counterintuitive, but I’ve learned to approach dreams with an attitude of “not knowing.” Isn’t that why we record dreams—to know? Nope. We record dreams to expand our inner work/growth. We tend with curiosity. The process often reveals that more than one thing is true. That’s why you’ll see me write dualism like work/growth. The dream image could be one or the other or both. It’s learning to see the tension between opposites, such as the ability to be simultaneously grieved and joyous, or in the midst of crisis the ability to also feel resilient and hopeful. I highly recommend Marion Woodman’s lecture, “Holding the Tension of Opposite” which can be found on Audible (it’s only 51 minutes long, a modern podcast from the past).

By the way, Marion Woodman sits on my Dream Council. You can invite anyone! When you tend your Dreams, remember to ask the core questions: What is happening?Who is showing up? Sometimes Insect Nation shows up; other times it’s an emotional cocktail like Summer Sadness; and maybe it’ll be Marion or another Dead/Ancestral Mentor.

The Dreamscape—or at least mine—has a present quality of major transition. I think this is the World’s Dreaming, the Collective Unconscious of Humanity that is in Living Flux. My nightly Dream Ritual, a bedtime somatic meditation, has revealed many images of incubation, and since the Dirty Jeans and Tampoons Dream, every dream thus far includes beds. The last time I had a series of Bed Dreams was right before my university made a shocking announcement two days before Spring Break 2023 that it was canceling all sports teams (yes, all the coaches were fired in an assembly of staff, students, and faculty) and would close its doors after fulfilling summer classes.

Bed Dreams make me think of incubation. A time of rest, like a hibernation or break from the usual activities in a day or period. We can expand that notion though because this isn’t about knowing; it’s about signaling a change. And Humanity is in for Big Changes. What, we do not know, but Dreams are pointing us in the direction of what needs to hold our curiosity to explore, expand, and add to the conversations of the heart. The language of the heart is comprised of living images—dreams, poetry, visual art, performance art, storytelling/catching. We can fear or we can imagine what hasn’t yet been imagined! Keep in mind, that even disturbing, intolerable nightmares contain curious elements for us to engage and learn from that which repels us.

Therefore—dirty jeans and tampons! Not exactly glamorous gifts for the Feminine Sacred from the Masculine Sacred. Let’s expand and see…when I think of dirty jeans, I recall wearing out the seat of my Sears Toughskin jeans as an eight-year-old girl when I discovered the joy of making “slides” out of the massive Sierra Nevada granite boulders near my father’s logging camp. I recall the heady smell of horse, trail grit, and worn jeans after the cattle drives of my youth. I think back to how my family was so paranoid of being perceived as poor, I was instructed to keep one pair of jeans clean and new for “going to town.” Dirty jeans can be a liberating gift. Tampoons, too if you think back to the ‘70s/’80s commercials of all the activities a menstruating girl could do with a box of Kotex.

I’m curious, how do you see dirty jeans and tampoons as a vital gift to a girl before her 18th birthday?

I hope this post orients you to my Dream Tending process because I have a series of connected dreams unfolding. I held back from the first one because it featured Trump as a Dream Figure, and I thought—not going there, at least not before Thanksgiving and my husband’s important follow-up appointments to save his eyesight. But the Dreams keep going there and as I came back to this post, I realized, THIS is the first dream in the series.

When it comes to tending, I want to make my posts public. However, if there is a component that connects to my Recovery of Self, I’ll keep that for private subscribers.

Yeah, no kidding—Trump showed up as a Dream Figure! Talk about an Intolerable. But who knows, maybe as a Dream Figure, we can access the living image in a way that offers insight, growth, and support we need for transitional times as these. I’ll talk more in a future post about how I used Dream Tending to overcome my lifelong struggle with night terrors and sleep paralysis. I no longer fear nightmares. I actually set up boundaries in my dreams and every night, I work with my Dream Council. If you want to know more, I recommend Stephen Aizenstat’s book, “Dream Tending.”

Meanwhile, I offer you Beetle Woman as a Dream Figure. Perhaps you will find her on your Dream Council or in your Dreams! If you want to process Dirty Jeans and Tampons, this is the song that came up in my Somatic Movement practice (just move, sway, roll on the floor, leap in your imagination, dance—listen to your body for guidance):

Tend forward, Dreamers! There’s no way out but through. Make it a beautiful journey.