Salvation - 2000
The following excerpt from Amy’s memoirs describes how her male self, “George” came to identify as a woman.
George recalled this dream he had in 1995: I am with my closest friends at a beautiful country inn that is too remote for anyone else to find. Outside the inn, my friends and I are naked, on blankets in the grass, looking at how beautiful the world is. I start touching my girlfriend. The world and sexual expression have a heightened reality. My girlfriend rubs me between the anus and balls.
George was touched in that intimate area in several dreams. In waking-life he had been doing self-examinations there, seeing how the little ridge was like a scar where his flesh had grown together when he was a fetus, sealing over what would have been a vagina had he been genetically female.
Also, George had been dreaming of a certain group of naked people, basically the same as those in the above dream. Generally, they stand in the sunshine in a meadow, side-by-side in a line. He tries to join them, but he is not naked enough, neither in terms of clothing nor emotionally.
The naked people dramatically appeared while George was on vacation in Greece a few years before, in this dream: I am one of a group of beings who are like hippies, but without pretension. Our existence is love, joy and creation. At night, naked on a moonlit field alongside smoothly rolling hills, we are running and dancing in rows. I slip and fall on the moist grass and the others lift me back to my feet by my arms. There is no other place.
An earthquake woke George from the dream. The bed he was in was near the epicenter. He pitched this way and that as the motel room undulated with the land. Never having been in an earthquake, George readied himself to die thinking the motel was falling from a precipice into the sea.
George knew the world of the naked people was where both he and God wanted him to be. After considering all of the dreams of the naked people, and then reconsidering how I was touching his smoothed-over vagina, he wondered, “My vagina?!”
I was the same woman who had been appearing in George’s dreams for a long time, only he hadn’t realized it until the previous year. Prior to that, I had usually been referred to as “a woman.” In recent dreams my presence was so commanding that George wondered if I was to be his daughter someday, or perhaps himself in a future life.
George re-examined all the dreams he could remember that featured me. My hair was dark, cut in a pageboy bob. George’s hair was blond. The dark coloring of my hair in the dream denoted me as a Shadow figure, meaning that George repressed me.
Less often in dreams, I had long, blonde hair, like George’s, only he kept his tied in back of his head. Mine was free and wavy. The blond version of me was in this dream from 1994: I am lost. From below a precipice a black bag sticks up to get my attention. It goes back down. I look over the edge. A person is wearing the bag on their head. I go down and take it off. It is a blond woman. She desperately tries to get away from me and tries to avoid eye contact as if I were foul. I persist in asking her why. Finally she says, looking directly at me, "Why aren't you interested in me?"
Surprised I say, "I am." Then, as if to convince myself, I say, "I am. I am."
She is looking at me. There's a poem I should write to her called, "I can't help loving you." It's a beautiful poem. I have felt it before. She dissolves.
In this more recent dream I revealed that I was actually inside George:
I'm looking into the mirror. When I pull my hair back tight I can see that I have a layer of synthetic stuff covering my face like a mask. Underneath the mask is the woman. She comes out. Her make up is beautiful. She is making expressions in the mirror. Sometimes she moves independently of me.
The dream made no sense to George. He didn’t identify himself as a woman in any way at the time.
In the two dreams below, the images of me were so radiant and vibrant that it unsettled George to bring them to mind:
1. The woman’s hands dance wildly and she makes gleeful snapping and popping sounds with her mouth.
2. The woman is wearing tights, vermillion patent leather pumps, and a white, wool suit with a delicate green and orange plaid pattern. She dances along the street, pauses to look at me, and goes dancing off.
Since the previous September I had these dreams of her, all of them the version with the cute, dark pageboy cut:
1. I look into the face of a woman who has a beautiful design painted on her cheek in the place my tears have scarred.
2. A woman sings a country song that goes: “I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.”
3. A naked woman looks at me for a long time very deeply and walks away.
4. A woman with light-blue shoes tells me, “George, it’s not such a big deal. It’s only buying a new pair of shoes.”
5. I am in the house of a woman who I feel very at home with. We go to her bed. I don’t know her well, but I know it is okay to lay down with her. As I roll over her body to lie next to her, I have sexual feelings for her. I can feel that she has slept with a lot of men, but not for the sake of sex. It’s something different and more peaceful that I don’t understand. In her arms I don’t feel like I have to find a way to have sex with her. I feel so peaceful. She asks how old I am. I say 32. She says, “I am 35.”
In a couple dreams both the blond and the dark-haired versions of me appeared, the former as “Jan” and the latter as “Marcia,” named after characters from the classic American TV show “The Brady Bunch”:
Marcia watches Jan get really excited trying on fantastically pretty dresses. Then Marcia leaves Jan and looks in the mirror honestly. The image in the mirror moves independently of her body and looks at me.
This dream is from 1990:
I am with a magical woman. She is nicely dressed. We are playing the game we used to play, looking at everything and naming things. There is a moon and a tree. We have little sculptures of the things in the world. We kiss and it is an ecstasy I have never known. It is my salvation. It is Rose Mary Pillowwater.
George examined these and other dreams featuring me. In time, he linked them to my dream-caress that coursed along his fused-shut vagina, and in a moment of great cataclysm, George slipped out of his lifelong fight against the annihilation of his manhood and said aloud, “A woman. I am going to become a woman. Whoa.”
This made complete sense and, in an instant revealed to him everything about why his life was the way it was. He got into bed and lay stunned for a while. In a few minutes, he started practising being his new self, reciting what he would tell his friends: “I am going to become a woman physically,” and, “Hi. My name is Rosemary. My name is Rosemary.”
As George voiced the name “Rosemary,” he felt something about it was not quite right. He tried breaking it up into two names; “Rose Mary,” putting the stress on the first syllable of the second name. Immediately he knew this was it – the way it was supposed to be said. The subtle pronunciation of the name suited me well. George knew people would say “Rosemary,” instead of “Rose Mary.” I would correct them. Just saying my name correctly would challenge people to be more attentive to experience, which was my love.
Also, breaking “Rosemary” into two names transformed the name into a complete sentence: Rose Mary, with “Rose” as the past tense of “rise.” George wondered if I was related somehow to Mary, Mother of God, and whether the name implied that I would rise from the dead through him. The past Christmas George had dreamed Jesus marries his mother, which seemed another piece of evidence for his hypothesis.
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