Colorful Pants and Carpet Bag?

I had a dream I was in a mall. A vibrant woman in her 40's shows me a selection of brightly colored silk pants with an Indian design/pattern. She seems very excited as she points them out to me. I smile and think they are beautiful but I get distracted and look at the wall behind us. It is a large wall, lined with hundreds of carpet bags. I remark "wow look at all the carpet bags" and am in awe. I then go down to the middle floor of the mall. I walk into a cafeteria and see a young cousin of mine in real life (I always thought she was very quiet and mousy) sitting there looking very shy. I acknowledge her and realize I am just like her. I then go further downstairs into the cellar. Hundreds of African-American girls sit in the cafeteria. They seem to be talking very angrily like they want to fight. There is a lot of energy in the room.

What is going on here?

Alma

I this dream, you are exploring various levels of your self. A dream of knowing yourself.

Yes...I suppose the vibrant and happy parts of myself (the woman in the mall), the shy insecure parts, and the angry/energetic parts...

Right, but they are inttergrated in you, and are in harmony.

Thank you. It's strange sometimes, having such a constant awareness of my contradictory feelings/traits. I sometimes feel like I'm more than one person.

Minus the psychopathology, hopefully. haha.

Your therapy is working. The "psychopathology," now reduced to almost nothing. That is why you had the kind dream you had.

Awesome!

You would like to express some aspect of yourself more colorfully, but you feel constrained by culture, so much so that you feel angry and oppressed.

Carpet baggers were opportunistic northerners who came to exploit the defeated gracious south. They were consideres greedy, low class boorish people and they were resented for buying up the rui.s of the grand old south. So you could feel drawn to expression of something you associate with India, but you dont want to look like a carpetbagger, which could mean you dont want to exploit and disrespectfully (like western feminists appropriating the hindú female god Kali) or you fear looking like a contemptible outsider to your own culture.

Maybe Im projecting. Im one of those older wasp women who would love to wear beautiful panjabi suits in summer but fear people would roll their eyes at me.

Watch out for the black girls in your basement. They dont care about your stuffy old culture. They are young, oppressed, and angry. So are you, deep down.

I found this definition of "fancy pants". It seemed applicable .

fancy-pants (American & Australian informal) trying to seem too attractive or too clever in a way that is false (always before noun) We liked the restaurant's food but not the fancy-pants decor. I don't know what she sees in that fancy-pants college professor of hers.

Thanks Teacake...your response wasn't easy to read and it stirred up a lot of uncomfortable emotion in me, but maybe that's what I needed. It's true, I do feel angry. And I don't think it's just me; I have a lot of other friends my age (25) who feel the same way. Mangled and weighed down by a consumerist and bottom-line culture.

I hope you don't mind, this may end up being a long-ish post. I associate the feminine with India, and India with the interconnectedness of all things, the ever-renewing flow of Life and Death. I've always had this awareness of life cycles and I feel our culture doesn't. One important thing I forgot to mention was that in the dream, the pants were in the women's section of the mall; the carpet bags in the men's section. I do feel a certain degree of oppressed womanhood, especially in grad school.

Grad school has been especially rough. My school has a rather corporate atmosphere and I've done my best to retain my voice. I'm an artist and a sensitive person so it's been difficult at times to "get with the program" and be the student they want me to be. Now school is over and I have a month off; I've put so much concentrated effort in one area for the past 3 months (NOT easy for me to do, as I'm typically scattered and distracted and bipolar like most artists) and I feel deflated, but also kind of confused and muddled emotionally...almost a feeling of like..."what now?"

Regardless, I feel grad school is my ticket to a good job and finally getting out of my parents' house so I feel in a bind...

I saw some positive aspects to the dream too...the colorful Indian pants I think represent the colorful and vibrant aspects of myself; and in the dream, the woman was pointing very clearly at the PANTS, not the carpet bags; I only got distracted by the carpet bags. So perhaps if I focus on India and what it means to me, I will not feel so oppressed...rather than focus my attention on carpet bag issues....

And the black girls...I think they can be positive as well, as anger is only energy, and there was a LOT of energy in that basement....

Thanks so much,

Alma