The ability to procreate; the glandular bias which connects with what the conscious personality faces in emotional, mental and physical disposition; the caring, nurturing feelings which emerge out of sexual mating when healthy; the desire for a mate; the sense of connection and identity with other women, other female creatures and female aspects of nature. In its positive aspect it may represent the sure confidence with which a woman may demand from her man that he treat her womanhood with the respect it deserves. This means meeting the full flood of her sexual need with its desire for a child, a caring and supportive nest to rear that child in, and her female creativity which may rise from ihat basic reproductive drive into other social creativity and personal demand for respect.
Example: He was very brown, could have been a native but he didn’t feel strange to me. We were making love, I was very aware of the pleasure in my lower body. It was very slippy slidy and wet, there was enjoyment for both of us. Very intense body feelings with a childlike quality, not passion— but pleasure and joy in my vagina’ (Susy I). Susy is feeling happy and joyful about her ‘native’ or natural sexual feelings —particularly the sensual side of sex. Sensual pleasure, as with emotional pleasure, is as much a food for our physical and emotional self as bread is for our physical body.
In a woman’s dream, generally how one feels about one’s own sexual needs, but this includes procreation as well; the health or feeling state of the sexual self and physical vagina; her central femininity; sexual urge; ability to have a child; concept of her physical attraction; temple or church of life, one’s experience of motherhood or experience of the procrea- tive relationship with one’s mother. Example: ‘I had very little pubic hair and thought it must be because I had just had a shower, but, no, on looking again I had very little hair. I was hugging Mary (a friend), my arms around her back and one hand holding her vagina. It was then I noticed she was the shape of a man there. I drew away for a second at the discovery then felt OK as it meant I was hugging a male/female person. We were very warm together.
(Two days before this dream my husband had said his mother called a vagina a Mary.)’ (Lucy R). Lucy is ‘touching’ or becoming aware of what could be seen as her own wholeness, which includes her male nature.
In male dreams: the vagina represents one’s feelings or fears about meeting a woman’s full sexuality, the deep experience of the relationship with one’s mother, binh and how mother met one’s emerging male sexuality; one’s desire for sexual expression. Bleeding vagina: his trauma, fears about a woman and sex. Example: ‘She was now quite naked, dead and stiff, but still bleeding from the vagina. I walked along, the dead body walked like a clockwork soldier. It was quite hornble to see its semblance to life’ (Derek A). Derek’s relationship with a woman, and with his own emotions and sexuality, is dead’ and deeply hun—the blood. He can mechanically have sex—the clockwork soldier—but not with deep feeling bonds or satisfaction.