Bodily Fluids, Fluid Body, In Dreams

Artwork by Liza Hyatt

After decades of paying attention to my dreams, about 8 years ago, I found my way to Natural Dreamwork. Through this dreamwork practice, I have been supported to more fully experience the embodied soulfulness that dreams guide us to. I wrote the following poetic-prose reflection to look back on past dreams that were unforgettable because they were so vividly connected to my body. I brought to this looking-back process the Natural Dreamwork perspective that dreams care for my body’s woundedness and its wildness. In this writing, I celebrate how my dreams have expressed my bodily experience as a woman through every stage of my life journey.

In dreams, my body shape-shifts, speaks aloud, remembering, foreseeing. 

In my dreams, my body can change age and form, time travel, swim in wild stormy seas, love freely anyone I desire, sing beautifully, and heal.  

In my 20’s, I dreamed I was buried alive and in the grave, my entire body exploded. 

I dreamed that my vulva and vagina were a wild animal’s muzzle, a wolf or bear, opening and closing hungrily, and speaking a forgotten language, primordial speech. 

Years before I ever nursed a child, I dreamed that breast milk was flowing out of my breasts and down my naked body, into my vagina, which was a mouth that was suckling my own milk back in, a circuit of self-nourishment.

In my 30’s I dreamed that a woman covered with veils was inside each of my tears, lifting the veils slowly, showing me how to open all the layers of my sorrow, gently, growing more naked.

And years after breast-feeding my only child, sending her to school, and knowing I will never birth another, though I still could and sometimes longed to, I dreamed that a small, white, breast shaped woman was talking to me. She called herself the Breast-Milk Goddess, and told me she was leaving. It was time for her to go.

In my 40’s, I dreamed I was living on a frontier in an empty mercantile store, no food left on its shelves. I turned into a cougar and ran out into the open prairie to hunt for what could feed me.

I dreamed I lay down on my driveway in a fetal position and turned into a woman made of mud. It was such a relief to become soft, wet earth.

I dreamed that a group of rule-breaking nuns were reclaiming their role as priestesses, preparing the sacrament themselves. They gave me a handmade earthenware chalice and asked me to weep into it. They would mix some of my tears into the bread they were making. They would add the rest of my tears in with the wine. They assured me that my grief was needed and was meant to outgrow my personal grief and become, for the rest of my life, world grief, Earth-grief, communal grief.

In my 50’s, I dreamed that all of my last remaining eggs were now being buried outside in a corner of my yard, near the little shrub called a Burning Bush, whose bright red autumn leaves were falling, leaving the branches bare for winter.

And then after menopause, more than once, I dreamed I was pregnant again, amazed. And sometimes, I gave birth, suddenly. The baby just slipped out.

And one winter night, aching with grief, I dreamed that God was my lover spooning me from all sides, all dimensions, melting into every pore of my body to heal a fever. I woke feeling more fully loved than I have ever felt. 

And as I approached my 60th birthday, I dreamed that I was walking toward a parade of naked women, their skin all the colors of earth. Upon their chests, three of them had painted these words: We weren’t allowed to speak aloud… Our bodies know… And need a voice… I hurried to join them. I will walk with them for the rest of my life.