Last night I had a dream where I was socially interacting as male, had male anatomy, etc. - it usually disturbs me when I wake up and realize my unconscious is operating this way, it feels like I don’t see myself as a woman, which is true on a conscious level but it’s painful when I don’t even see myself as a woman in my dreams.
Sometimes even before transition trans women see themselves as women in their dreams, and I marvel at that. I think part of my denial was integrating every internal part of me that felt female as being actually authentically male, that all men are actually feminine in this way or that. So the authentically feminine parts of me still feel “male”.
Anyway, I just wanted to do a quick poll and see:
(if any transmasc folks or enbies are reading this, I would love your input too, even though I’m using gendered language, I don’t mean to be excluding)
- did you have dreams where you were a woman before you transitioned?
- what was the process like of your internal concept changing as you transitioned?
- when did you start appearing as a woman in your dreams post-transition? (did the frequency increase post-transition, what was that change like?)
- how do you relate to your self-conception, does it disturb you to be a man in your dreams, is it a relief to be a woman in your dreams?
Some very good observations here, thank you for your encouragement - and I think you’re right that my dream is mostly operating on habit, and it’s just a slow change to those habits. I struggled a lot with rewiring how I think about myself as a part of voice training, because I kept thinking of myself as male I would default to a male voice - in my head and in the world. Even now I guess I am still working on that, but there were months where it was more difficult and unpleasant, where I constantly felt invalidated or like an imposter because I had to work so hard against the seemingly “innate” or more likely just habituated ways of thinking of myself and behaving.
I just felt like certainly I’m not an authentic woman if it’s so hard for me to think of myself as one, right? It really can feel invalidating, but I think you are right that it’s not necessarily some deep truth about who I am that I think this way, it’s just habit - and a habit that I am happy to change, and which I am distressed by having developed in the first place.
It is interesting to me that your internal sense has developed so much ahead of any transition, I seem to be going about this in the opposite way - transitioning first and figuring out my self-conception later. Hopefully if / when you transition that will be much to your advantage, as you will have less tension as everything aligns.
Thank you for the wisdom and kind words 🥰