Trans Dreams Are Made of This

I would like to share a surprising fact that I discovered while transitioning about the gender I am in my dreams. I don’t know if this is a universal experience for trans people, but I found it surprising enough that I would write about it.

Since I started transitioning, I took a note of every dream I had in which I was conscious of my own gender. I was able to take note of 28 occurrences that I wrote in a notebook when I woke up from a dream. Sometimes it was painful to force myself to get up, write my notes, before going back to the comfort of my bed, but I know I would otherwise have forgotten the memory in the morning. Luckily, sometimes I just woke up in the morning with the memory of a dream.

Always a woman or girl

First, very strikingly, I am always a woman or girl every single time. I have never dreamt of myself as a man or a non-binary person since I started transitioning.

Then, I dream of myself at many different stages in life: as an adult woman, as a teenage girl or as a young girl. Something interesting to note is that since I transitioned as an adult, I never actually lived as a girl when I was a child or teenager. However, in those dreams, I see myself as a girl, and never as a boy, even though that was the gender I was living as at that age. It seems to suggest that what matters is how I see myself now and my true gender, not which gender I lived as when I was that age, like you could expect if it was based on real childhood memories.

Do I know I’m trans?

In most of my dreams, I am fully conscious of being a trans woman/girl. In some rare cases, I don’t dream of myself as trans, but I might know I’m a lesbian in the dream, which corresponds to my sexual and romantic orientation in real life. This is typically in dreams that involve me meeting other women and being attracted to them.

You might notice that by combining the information from the two diagrams and considering the slice sizes, it implies that I have some dreams where I’m a trans child or teenager. But isn’t that surprising since I transitioned as an adult? These dreams don’t correspond to any real time frame where I lived as my true gender, they would be alternative realities in which I transitioned much earlier in my life.

Examples of these dreams are for instance me being embarrassed undressing in front of other girls at the swimming pool at the school, with them being supportive and helping me put on my bikini. In another dream, that’s me seeing the line in front of the girl’s bathroom and thinking “what if I went to the boys’ like before transitioning?” and then thinking “that’s silly”. In the “lore” of those dreams, it’s very clear that the assumption is that I transitioned as a young girl or teenager.

Maybe the reason is that I can’t see myself as anything else than a girl, so my brain makes up an explanation for how I can live as that gender at such a young age?

Sadly, in some of these dreams, both as a woman or a younger girl, there is some transphobia and the feeling of being unaccepted, like in a dream where I run away as a young girl because no one in society understands me, or others with people deadnaming and misgendering me as an adult. But a lot of my dreams also take place in an accepting world where other women and girls accept me as one of them and help me integrate to live as my true gender.

Conclusion

Do all trans women dream of themselves as women exclusively? Probably not. Do I believe this “proves” that I’m truly a woman and that trans women who sometimes dream of themselves as men are not as valid, certainly not! I luckily never woke up from a nightmare where I was living as my incorrect gender, or from a regular dream but with a feeling of dysphoria waking up and realizing I was the wrong gender in my dream. In that respect, I consider myself to be very lucky with my dreams!

Finally, those dreams where I’m not even conscious that I’m trans are recent ones, and for me this seems to echo the fact that in day-to-day life, I also forget that I’m trans. For instance, a few days ago, I cleared my throat and some people looked at me, surprised, probably because my “voice” sounded very loud for a typical woman. I thought “Oh yeah I’m trans I forgot!”