In my dream Dayani, Krish and I are in a forested area–must be Pennsylvania–in a house when a dinosaur–yes the kind that you see in natural history museums–starts walking towards the house. It is very big and it has those spiny things that you associate with dinosaurs. We are all very frightened. And Krish takes Dayani and runs through the forest away from the dinosaur. I cannot run because suddenly there is a small child, a girl there–about two years old–and in my dreams I am responsible for her safety. So I tell this child here let me carry you; I can run fast. But the child is very willful as children can be and she refuses to be carried by me. She wants to walk at her own pace. Meanwhile the dinosaur is chasing us though it never quite catches up with us even with the child walking so slowly. Anyway finally this child and I reach the part where the forest ends and town begins and suddenly it is a street in Trivandrum. There is a group of women standing in front of a house and I ask them which way should I turn to run away from the dinosaur. They are not concerned at all and they vaguely gesture towards a direction and tells me “that way.” In my dream I know that Dayani and Krish are safe and I feel strangely unafraid for them but afraid for this child.  Very interesting dream.

Here is my analysis: The most interesting part of this dream is obviously the identity of this child for whom I feel a great sense of responsibility. Otherwise I would have run away with Krish and Dayani as well. In my dream the identity of this child is very interesting: I see three different children in this child–I mean the identity of this child in my dream is split across three children. What is peculiar is that they are all my nieces–sometimes I see that the child is Noni, sometimes it is Anju, sometimes it is Nandu. What does this class have in common? They are all my nieces–they are all children in my family, not Krish’s. And the other glaring thing is that my brother’s children are not among this class of children. They should be because I am very close to them, but they are not in my dream. This is significant. Whenever the identity of an entity is split across several composite identities, then it is not any of these, but semantically linked to yet another repressed identity. I think this dream is about my repressed fear about something not happening well for some child in my family. Also the fact that there is a dinosaur. What is a dinosaur? A dinosaur is an extinct animal. I think I am afraid for some child in my family not making it. And it is not my own–because Dayani has been carried away by Krish.