That was just a dream...

Although I usually do my best to remember my dreams and try to figure out if they mean anything for my waking life, I haven't in the past used any heuristic to work through any of them.  I mean, most of my dreams seem about as pertinent as the guy's dream in that new drug commercial where the beaver and Abe Lincoln are waiting for him to play chess while the astronaut is watching on...
Back on Tuesday though we got Keely's email, "Ask these questions about your dreams" and I read through it carefully and realized that I hadn't ever really asked myself how active or passive I was in my dreams, or how successful I was in communicating in them.

So with those questions roiling around in my mind for two days, last night I had at least one doozy of a dream.
My house was on fire.  Sorta kinda on fire.  And not this house that I currently live in, but some big old place with a huge basement and gas lines running through it.  I was living there with some man -- maybe it was my ex-husband, but it seemed to be more just the idea that it was "a man" -- a significant other, as it were, rather than anybody in particular.
So it wasn't really yet quite on fire -- there seemed to be a leak in the gas line, and there was a little flame where there shouldn't be one.  I saw it and started calling for, let's say it was, Bernie to help me figure out where to shut down the gas.  We shut off one line, but the little flame was still burning.  He called the gas company and I wanted to call 911 for the fire department but he didn't want to do that, explaining that the gas company people were coming.
I think we had decided to get out of the house either way, so I rushed down to the neighbor's and asked to use their phone.  There was a guy just getting off a mobile out in the yard, so he handed it to me and I called 911.
The man at the 911 number was Indian (we watched a 30 Days episode last night where this guy goes to live in India for 30 days because all of the telephone service jobs are being outsourced to there, LOL) and he first kept pressuring me about the address, then about whether the house was really on fire or not.  I look around at the house, and there is smoke rising from one part of it.  I start screaming at him to please send someone soon -- it is an old wooden house, and if it catches, the whole thing will be gone.
But he won't, and he hangs up on me.
I see that the gas people have arrived, so I run back down to the house, and there are two women talking to Bernie about the gas lines in the house.  They don't really address me when I get there, and when they finally show me where the switch is to the line we had been looking for, they tell me that turning that switch is really not something that a woman can do.  I'm like, "why not?" -- I really don't understand.  But they just continue talking to Bernie as if I'm not even in the room.
And about here is where I think the dream ends.

So: what in the heck?!?!?

First thing is, I'm running around trying to put out a little fire that I can't seem to put out.  I'm spending lots of energy talking to the wrong people who aren't listening anyway. but then even the "right" people are dismissive and off-putting to me.

Second thing is, most of this general dismissal seems to be related to my gender.  Now, that's happened to me a lot in my life, particularly in my relationship with Bernie, but we don't have to go into that now.  In general, I was so much more defensive about it when I was younger -- I had had so many roadblocks put up to me as a female who enjoyed stereotypically masculine interests, like playing baseball on the city league as a kid, working on cars, etc.  I tend to joke that my mother reared me to be a good husband, but that's pretty much the truth.  I don't think that any of the current fires in my life are burning because of my gender, though, so this one is a little harder to get at.  Maybe it's just that that's the way I've felt so disenfranchised that that's my "default" when I feel like no one's listening.  The only man who listened to me in my dream was the neighbor guy who handed me his phone.  Interestingly (or not?) it was a Black family who lived next door to us; it was a Black man who helped me, not my husband or the Indian guy on the phone.
Now the women weren't any better to me, and that's on the surface a conundrum.  Well, it would be, except that that's how I have been treated by women all my life: as an outsider.  Women never liked me when I was younger; I had so much power getting my way with men and I had no time for gossipy chit-chat or false bonding with "girlfriends."  The only women, then, who have consistently been my friends in my life were women who had lots of power: they were either very beautiful or they, like me, had the ability to play a room.  So it's really not surprising to me that even the women in my dream dismissed me because I was a woman.

Third -- how was I communicating?  I was in a panic -- I was screaming and bossy and freaked out, and I was ineffective.  Would I have been effective in the dream if I had kept my cool and calm?  The world may never know.

But in short: was I active or passive? 
Very active, but in directions and ways that weren't helping.  I acted like Chicken Little.

Did I succeed in communicating?
No, absolutely not, to anyone in my dream.  Even when the women at the end finally explained what I needed to know to me, they dismissed my ability to take the correct action in the first place.

Were there any characters in my dream who were guides?
I keep thinking about this one in terms of the others who got things done.  Bernie in the dream got something done by calling the "right" company.  He also had potential to get something done by virtue of being a man.  The women from the gas company got something done by succeeding in telling us where the switch was to shut off the gas.
But guides?  I guess by not running around crazy -- by accepting their limitations -- ?  I don't know.  While I was in the dream, it was all of them who seemed not quite right: not being a little more worried about the whole thing and accepting that a woman wouldn't be able to turn the switch in the first place.

I'll do some accessing a little later today and see if I can't get at some more of what could be behind this.  I know that I had another dream that I can't remember now. 
Onward and upward!