"I dreamt I had holes in my legs"

"Last night I dreamt I was sitting around with my brother and roommate in my apartment. Everything looked very real and very accurate. Then I noticed that I had some sort of pock mark, almost like a kind of dimple on my inner thigh. As soon as I noticed one, there were many more, from my crotch to my knees. I started picking at them because they had accumulated some sort of smegma, almost like an oozing pimple, and at first one little pin prick of white was coming out. Then larger amounts began to come out, then whole chunks of crab meat. I pulled a millipede/crab thing with no head and hundreds of legs nearly three inches long out of one of these dimples. I felt horrified and disgusted, and I woke up in shock! What does this mean?" - Jessica, 24, California



Jessica, I can understand pretty easily why you'd feel horrified and disgusted by this dream. I hope you can take some comfort in the fact that dreams of this type are more common than you may imagine. It's a pretty complex group of symbols that are at work here, so I'm going to take some time to examine them to determine why your brain has produced them.

First of all, your dream is set in a rather mundane place, namely your home. Besides being just mundane, your home is ideally a safe place, a place of recuperation and rest. Further, you're surrounded by people that you trust, or that you should be able to trust, namely your roommate and your brother. Clearly it is significant that you are with these two people, of all the people you know or have heard of, or even all the people that your brain could have visually created for you to interact with. Hopefully your home is a place where you feel safe, and hopefully your brother and your roommate are people that know you well, and that you trust.

The safe setting and familiar faces are in a direct opposition to the main feature of the dream, the mysterious "dimples" that have appeared on your leg. The body of the dreamer is often representative of the perceived physical or emotional health of the dreamer. The image of the self can be considered a manifestation of a number of issues that one may be perceiving. In this situation, the issues are manifesting themselves on your legs, the critical structure that allows a person to move about the world, or to literally "stand on your own two feet." Thus, the wounds that have opened up on your legs in this dream may be indicative of a problem that you're perceiving in the way that you're moving about in the world. Disease in the legs can also indicate that you've experienced a major psychological blow of some kind.

Not to get overly Freudian, but the specific location of the wounds suggests that perhaps you are plagued by issues of sexuality. Being placed above the knee and on the inner thigh, these oozing sores are sexualized. An obvious assertion here is that perhaps you are afraid of contracting an STD, or perhaps you are nervous that you are misusing your sexual power. All people, men and women, have the ability to literally move through the world by getting by on their looks, or by manipulating others. I cannot make a definite distinction as to which is the true cause of these sores, only you know the answer! Further, as your brother and roommate make no attempt to help you, or even question you, it seems that this problem is one you may be dealing with all on your own.

In trying to get to the root of the problem, you begin to "dig" at the sores in your dream. Digging is often associated with deep introspective analysis. This suggests that whatever the problem is, you are certainly aware of it, and perhaps you are doing your best to fix it. The result of your digging is that you begin to find things within your wounds that really don't belong there- first, chunks of crab meat, and later a strange insect. It seems obvious that your continued "digging" is unearthing some nasty little critters. This seems to be a likely reflection of a large personal issue that you are already aware of, as you spend more time working at it, you find out that the problem is much more serious than you'd imagined.

In a very literal way, your brain has concocted a strange and powerful image to represent the complex problems of sexuality that I suspect you are suffering under. Strange creatures in dreams are often similar in various ways to the fears that they represent, here, a wiggly, wormy (and not entirely unphallic) insect with many sets of legs is being pulled out of your body. This horrid little creature has apparently burrowed inside you, not unlike some men I've known ;)

Jessica, since the dream is all your own creation, you are the only person who can say with certainty precisely what it means. I hope that the compilation of common symbols and meanings here is helpful, and thank you for letting me root around in your psyche!

Until tomorrow!

Rachel