I have never been able to remember exactly when first she spoke to me, so I must think back to remember a strange dream that I had one night. It was so long ago that I’m not certain just when it happened, although I am thinking that I would have been in the fourth or fifth grade at the time, as we reckon progress through an elementary school in these United States.

For a long time I have maintained that dreams are the one occult experience common to everyone. We all have them, or so experts who study dreams tell us, although we forget most of them. Only under favorable conditions do we remember a dream, usually one just before awakening. What creates the content of our dreams is a matter of controversy among philosophers, occultists, scientist, and many others. Some teach that dreams are interventions by Deity, others maintain that they are but randomly processed thoughts in our mind, the result of electrochemical impulses traveling through our neural circuits. I do not know but that I have them, and that this one has influenced my inner life more than any dream should.

When I entered the first grade, my father very simply and quickly instilled the fear that would undershadow my feminine conscience for many years to come. The year was 1965 and bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had captured the imagination of the nation’s youth and the animosity of their parents. My father regarded this as sheer, unmitigated rebellion, symbolized for him by men wearing their hair long and women wearing their skirts and dresses short.

My father was always stern and spoke in a loud authoritarian voice: “If you ever grow your hair long, I’ll put a bow in it and send you to school in a dress.”

He said this in his harshest, most disgusted tone, displaying his vicious scowl, so I knew two things from this. First, wearing long hair must be a bad thing. Next, that for me to wear a hairbow and a dress to school was some kind of a punishment, and hence, that must be a bad thing, too.

The first time that I remember seeing a boy wearing a dress was when I was in the third grade. There were two third-grade classes in the school and Jack was in the other one. He was already an established troublemaker and a bully. The saddest fact about him, though, was that he had exhibited also such social intelligence and interpersonal skills as befit a natural leader. So this combination of traits had already combined to make him the leader of a boyhood gang and would likely lead to a future in criminal enterprise. And his older and younger brothers showed much the same kind of character.

Early in our third year of school, Jack led a raid on the girls’ restroom and lockers which resulted in him and members of his gang being made to wear dresses as punishment.

Looking back at it, I have wondered if the initial inputs to my dream included the televised images of women’s gymnastics from the Olympic Games in Mexico City during the summer of 1968, with all those svelte, leotard-clad girls. There were also more shapely young women swimmers and divers competing as well, wearing tight one-piece swimsuits, hugging their bodies in much the same way as a leotard does.

Then in my string orchestra class, we were playing music arranged from ballets, so once again, girls in leotards would command my attention, but with the added elements of tights, tutus, and tiaras, with soft slippers secured by satin ribbons tied in pretty bows around the ankles.

Yet these influences were all abstract and influenced the other boys my age, too, except that I was the only boy in the school’s orchestra then. And also, there were more personal influences within my own family. I remember my grandmother telling the story of how my uncle, my mom’s little step-brother, once had to dress like a girl, wearing a majorette’s uniform for a play or pep rally at his high school on one occasion. She showed us the photographs of him crossdressed from his high school yearbook. Truth be told, my uncle looked very cute as a girl.

That was not the only girlish item about my uncle that was input into my mind for subconscious processing. He was the consummate athlete in high school, excelling at football, basketball, and track and field, lettering on every varsity team on which he participated. He had been recruited heavily by bigtime college football coaches, but instead, accepted his scholarship from a small liberal arts college in-state, so he could drive home on weekends. So, my uncle, to no one’s surprise, took his major course in physical education. So, on one of those weekends at home, when my grandmother went to do his laundry, she found ballet slippers and a maillot académique, or bodystocking, together with a dance belt in his bag, all of which proved shocking to her. The initial embarrassment subsided after he explained that ballet was a required course for all men and women enrolled as physical education students. And the instructor required the traditional garb for both genders.

Then there was the Hallowe’en party with my Webelos Scout troop and that’s where I witnessed voluntary crossdressing for the first time. Tim was our Assistant Troop Leader, not quite the alpha-male, but the principal beta, so he could get away with wearing his sister’s clothes as a costume. He wasn’t a “sissy” or a “queer”; no, he was just “cool” and was therefore entitled to demonstrate his position in the social hierarchy by violating certain rules. I might add that his older sister made certain that he really looked like a girl and pulled him into the ladies room a time or two to touch up his face. By the way, he was also a Baptist preacher’s son. You know, Deuteronomy 22:5 and all that? But being first beta, they just let it slide, I guess.

I was so jealous. For the first time, of which I am now certain, I wanted to dress as a girl. What would it feel like? What would I look like. I was jealous because I had no such option. Both my sisters were younger, and smaller, than myself, so they had no clothes that I might borrow, nor would they have had the experience or patience in helping their big brother dress up.

What I do remember now, was that I awoke from a dream one morning in a cold sweat. Well, I opened my eyes and got out of bed that morning. Saying that “I awoke” might not be entirely accurate, because the dream, or maybe the nightmare, stayed with me the whole day.

I dreamt that our usual activities in physical education had been replaced by either diving or ballet in the gymnasium. This was not even a possibility as we had no swimming pool, let alone a diving platform in the the school, nor did we have any classroom set up with a barre and mirrors along the walls. Nonetheless, I saw my all classmates there and all of us were wearing one-piece girls’ swimsuits or leotards and tights, accordingly.

When I looked down at myself, I was wearing a shiny royal blue leotard, white tights, and silver lamé ballet shoes. Three girls rushed towards me, one wearing a powder blue leotard, one powder pink, and the other, shiny hot pink, each with white tights and silver lamé ballet shoes. The first two wore big silver hairbows, and the third wore a small, silver tiara set with rhinestones, instead.

“Danny, you’re here!” Hot Pink greeted me, kissing me on the cheek. She continued, presenting me a large hairbow of silver lamé, “This would look nice on you.”

The three girls giggled and Hot Pink had Powder Blue affix the silver bow in my curly black hair. Then Powder Pink taking me by the left arm, and Powder Blue by my right, with Hot Pink pushing from behind, they ushered me to the barre, where they asked me to begin doing warming-up and stretching exercises along with them.

“Danny, we want to dress you up for school, tomorrow,” said Powder Blue. “Please let us make you up like a pretty girl.”

“But I don’t want to,” I complained. ”I’m a boy, not a girl.”

“But you can be!” insisted Powder Pink.

“Yes, you can!” agreed Powder Blue. “I have a beautiful royal blue velvet dress you could wear.”

“And I have a pretty pink satin dress your size,” said Hot Pink.

“And I have a white one you could wear,” Powder Pink told me, “with white Mary Janes and white gloves.”

“Please, Danny,” I heard a voice say to me. “You know you’re curious about wearing a dress. The royal blue would look best on you. Please, do it for me. I can look, you can look so very, very pretty!”

I turned around to see who had spoken to me, but no one was now behind me. The three others dancers were all continuing their movements at the barre.

When I didn’t see and couldn’t know who had spoken to me, I became frightened.

I awoke in a cold sweat.

The whole day at school the dream worried me. I didn’t know why I had it or what it meant, if it meant anything. When I saw two or three girls wearing royal blue dresses, I wondered which of them was the one that the voice in my dream wanted me to wear. There were a few more girls wearing pink or white dresses, so I wondered about those, too.

In school I was always a good student, but my focus failed that day. The dream had been quite vivid, and it stayed in my mind all day. I could only think about how I would look wearing my girl classmates’ clothes. The voice that I had heard in my dream would comment on items that she thought I should wear. Yes, it was a girl’s voice that I was hearing.

After lunch, when class started up again, I became a little dizzy and began shaking. I broke into a cold sweat again. My teacher noticed and asked me how I was feeling. She could see that something was wrong and asked me to step outside the classroom to talk. She was very concerned and sent me to the school nurse who took my vital signs, but by then I had calmed down and she sent me back to class. But years later, I would recognize that this had been my first time having a panic attack.

“Danny, it’s not so bad,” she said to me in the back of my mind. “You can be a pretty girl if you let me show you how. Please do this for me.”

Her voice frightened me that day and it would again. She would continue to frighten me until I acknowledged her and became willing to engage her in an internal dialogue. We would establish a truce, a peace between ourselves, sometimes an uneasy one. But I have wondered from time to time, if I might have done better simply to have yielded to her?

Nonetheless, for good or ill, I did not yield to her. I stood my ground as my masculine self and she retreated into a secret room in my Interior Castle. There she sat, curled up on a sofa, as I tried so hard to bring her all those things that I could not allow her to go out and seek for herself.

But at this time I have had to face an irritating fact. She was always smarter than myself. She was the more capable of us but I would not listen to her. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but my feminine self may have been better suited to face the world.

In short, I ought to have listened more to Danielle.