Last night I had a dream where I was socially interacting as male, had male anatomy, etc. - it usually disturbs me when I wake up and realize my unconscious is operating this way, it feels like I don’t see myself as a woman, which is true on a conscious level but it’s painful when I don’t even see myself as a woman in my dreams.
Sometimes even before transition trans women see themselves as women in their dreams, and I marvel at that. I think part of my denial was integrating every internal part of me that felt female as being actually authentically male, that all men are actually feminine in this way or that. So the authentically feminine parts of me still feel “male”.
Anyway, I just wanted to do a quick poll and see:
(if any transmasc folks or enbies are reading this, I would love your input too, even though I’m using gendered language, I don’t mean to be excluding)
- did you have dreams where you were a woman before you transitioned?
- what was the process like of your internal concept changing as you transitioned?
- when did you start appearing as a woman in your dreams post-transition? (did the frequency increase post-transition, what was that change like?)
- how do you relate to your self-conception, does it disturb you to be a man in your dreams, is it a relief to be a woman in your dreams?
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this is an interesting question. i’m transmasc and a little over five years since coming out and starting HRT. i’m also pretty old (for the internet, anyways), so i had lived a life while presenting female - i have a lot of experiences, memories, friends, ect from that time period
i never had dreams where i was a man, pre-transition. even nowadays, sometimes i dream and it uses my past self concept as a woman. it was a little surprising to realize i had dreams where i was a man, actually (which would have probably been a few years after i transitioned). but it varies, and i don’t put too much stock in it. it was hard enough for me to figure out that i’m a man, i don’t hold it against my dreams or whatever. and, conversely, it doesn’t bring me a ton of relief if i have a dream where i am a man, because i am one when i wake up, and that’s all that matters to me
in a lot of ways though, when i dream, my essence is that of myself, with the traits that i largely identify as - not male or female, but rather, determined, persevering, and intent on finding truth. these define who i am much more than my gender, in my dreams
all that said, the question about self concept is the hardest one for me to answer. i feel like an entirely separate person - albeit one who has the memories of another person’s lived life - and, in a way, the same heart. however, there is a definite break between where she ended and i began, which was marked by the moment i realized that i’m trans. so i don’t really know how to answer that, maybe it’s a slower and less traumatic experience for others? i had to forget everything i had learned, i had to rediscover who i was from scratch. in doing so, i realized that many things i attributed to “who i am” were much more tenuous than i had previously believed
but i think that’s a good realization, to know that you’ll still be yourself no matter what changes. it frees you to grow as a person, without clinging to notions of who you were or who you should be
no matter what you need to do to survive or blend in, no matter what body you have, don’t forget or doubt yourself in your womanhood
i might have had more to write, but i’m too sleepy and thought it would be better to write this out before i forgot. i’m looking forward to reading more of the responses in this thread later though
My dreams never were gendered on the self perspective. I suppose in my dream state, gender is not a thing I describe myself or others with. I don’t use pronouns at all in my dreams either, my language processing is completely asleep when dreaming.
I don’t have distinct memories of using gendered pronouns in my dreams, but I think that’s because such things are somewhat in the background. However, I have the impression that language is used, speaking happens, and even reading and writing words happens (though often distorted by the dreamy qualities, such as difficulty seeing and making out words, or the words morphing and changing or disappearing altogether as I try to read them).
That said, it’s clear to me what my gender was in my dream from the way I think about myself, the way I present myself, and so on. Since transitioning, increasingly in my dreams I become aware of my breasts and suddenly shift how I present in the world, and this shifting from male to female social roles based on body awareness is something that did not happen in my dreams pre-transition (no doubt because I didn’t really experience my body causing me to be gendered a different way in real life, I was always just “male” in body and social role).
What is interesting to me is that you don’t see the gender of others either - I feel as though my brain does a gendering and most people quickly are put in one box or another, and this is just as true in my dreams as in real life - in my dreams I certainly interact with men and women, even when I’m not particularly aware that the gendering is happening. If I think back on a dream I can think, oh, that was my mother in the dream (who I see as a woman, and who was just as much a woman to my awareness and mind in my dream as in real life, even if I was never particularly aware of that gendering happening).
Perhaps if I never pay attention to it, I could mistake myself for not gendering people, that I simply dream of my mother as the person they are without actually bringing gender into it at all - but I think this would be mistaking how I am actually thinking about such things, mistaking not paying particular attention for not having any awareness at all, even unconscious or subconscious awareness. Clearly in my dream I do not treat my mother like a man, I do not feel the pressure to masculinize for my safity in the way men in particular made me feel pre-transition, including the way my father and other men make me feel in my dreams. This is all true in the background even if I’m unaware or not particularly thinking about this.
Not that I’m saying this is what’s happening in your case - just that it’s hard for me to imagine not having some part of my awareness putting people in gendered boxes without my conscious awareness or effort, it just happens.
Half a year into transition here. I’ve been sleeping much better since I started, and I don’t think I remember having any dreams since.
In the past, my dreams which didn’t feature gender would have been “assumed male” regular me. But I did have a recurring dream where I’d wake up as a woman one day, and they were mostly centered around how to explain it to the people who knew me and generally enjoying my new life. Those were absolutely crushing to wake up from. Also sexual fantasies and dreams were mostly from a female perspective (thus I assumed it was just a fetish for a long time).
I would also very frequently dissociate during waking times and imagine myself doing whatever I was doing, but as a woman. Not in a sexual way, just a very melancholy “if only…” feeling.
That’s all stopped since starting transition. Instead, when I’ve been concentrating on something and come “back to reality” as it were, I often get a brief flash of “crap, I’m a man – no, wait – oh shit I’m out and transitioning is this a dream I must be crazy – calm down, this is what I want” with an associated adrenaline spike. That’s not fun. Other times when my mind wanders I can just reflect happily on how awesome it is I get to be a woman at last, if I can stave off the “you’re faking it” dysphoria.
I don’t have much experience yet of being treated as a woman socially, or even seeing myself in that role, but I’m hoping that will change and I get used to it. Then I’d expect my dreams to mostly reflect that.
Before transition I could probably sleep 11 - 12 hours every night, and I would wake up not feeling particularly refreshed.
With estrogen I started to wake up after 8 hours and feeling much more rested, though sometimes it seemed like 8 hours was the longest I could sleep and sometimes it seemed like I needed a little more sleep despite still feeling more rested overall. Progesterone then allowed me to sleep longer, I can reliably sleep 8 - 10 hours now and usually wake up feeling relatively alert and not as groggy.
I know what you mean about the “I’m a man, wait no, oh shit, oh no, wait, no - this is a good thing” panic, lol.
My sexual dreams are usually still in a male role with male anatomy, but it is often either detached from a sense of reality or self (as though my body becomes a third person and my awareness floats somewhat - it just feels like it’s not really me), or I find it actively disturbing or shameful. A lot of my sexual dreams tend to be oriented around shame, fear, disgust - sex with people I don’t find attractive, sex that I did not consent to or that I regret leading up to and as it is happening, etc.
While I didn’t have dreams where I lived as a normal cis woman, I often found myself able to bask in my female gender as I was falling asleep (I remember this especially when I was starting progesterone, which I would take at night), and waking up in the morning with my brain snapped back to the habituated way of thinking about myself as male, and that was always a disappointment to me.
I look forward to hearing about your experiences as the world starts to see you as a woman 💞
When I first started HRT a year ago, a few months into HRT, I had multiple dreams in where I was cis female. I loved every second of it. This only lasted for a week. Then all of my dreams after that either had me as genderless or had me as a trans woman. It’s been more than a year later, still dreaming I’m a trans woman. I suspect it’ll stay like that after I finally start to see myself as feminine, because I still struggle with seeing myself as masculine due to my face, my bottom organs, etc. I think once I get all of my surgeries done, I will see a substantial shift in my dream gender when my dysphoria is much less. Fingers and toes crossed.
A lot of my dreams seem to be stuck in that “man with female body parts trying to pass as a woman” feeling that I would maybe call feeling like a trans woman in my dreams - I think like you I either don’t think about my gender much, or when I do it is a reflection of the social realities I’m navigating as a trans woman.
Like you, I really hope that bottom surgery will help me recover from my persistent selfing as a man 🙁 It does straightforwardly feel hard for me to feel like an authentic woman with a penis - something I don’t seem to have trouble thinking about other people including friends, and even sometimes even with myself when I detach from myself and see myself as a third person, but to believe I am a woman seems unachievable to me - so much stands in the way.
I’ve always seen myself as a woman in my dreams as far as I can remember. Weird that my egg didn’t crack sooner with that happening since my childhood.
wow 🤩
Transfem NB, egg cracked in my late 20’s.
I think my dreams have almost always excluded showing my own body or gender. I remember having some dreams of being in the “wrong” bathroom and being worried about what others would think back in middle school.
After egg crack, I started sometimes having dreams dealing with people finding out that I’m trans, but if anxiety about coming out isn’t the focus of the dream, then my gender usually isn’t really part of them. I might have like randomly had larger boobs than irl months after starting hrt.
Even when referring to myself in third person to people I’m out to, I still default to old pronouns by accident most of the time. I rather I didn’t do that, but it’s not really a big deal for me. Find it kinda funny my dreams are more consistent about seeing me as trans/not a man than my own conscious language.
Most frequently now I would characterize my “gendered experience” in my dreams as of a male trying to navigate socially as a woman, having breasts but not being fully a woman (it’s not like I see myself as a cis woman in the dream, but instead my body feels like it has a mix of gendered traits, which reflects reality, and I am often trying to pass as a woman in my dreams, but feeling that tension created by being in-between, of feeling like I need to pass as both male and female).
My dreams have often featured my body in various ways, but it’s inconsistent and dreams are often disembodied or in bodies that couldn’t be mine or that don’t feel like mine, etc. - so that varies a lot.
Makes sense that the dreams reflect your anxieties, I think that’s happening to me too as I am trying to pass in reality my dreams are often about trying to pass. I think before I transitioned I also put effort into trying to “pass” more as a man, and that comes out in the dreams too - it’s like there is no gender that is effortless for me.
No physical changes yet (aside from one dream I had as a kid) but they have started incorporating various transition-related scenarios already. Only been on E less than a month and not even a full week after my first shot I was already having dreams where I demonstrated the whole process to unknown observers. I’ve also had a couple where I’ve gotten into arguments and cut off less accepting family members, so that’s been a Fun™ preview before it inevitability happens irl
oh interesting, that does seem right that the dreams incorporate your real life scenarios, all the anxieties and anticipated scenarios as well.
Hopefully the family member interactions don’t go as badly as your dreams imply they will 🫂
I will say, when I transitioned people were much less hateful than I expected, almost nobody in my life had an issue with it. A lot of people just don’t care as much as I thought they would - I projected my fears onto everyone, but what I found is that only a few people really were bothered by it, and usually for reasons that had more to do with them than me or my actual transition.
Hopefully your experience transitioning is also smoother than anticipated🤞
I’m mostly worried about my grandmother - it’s been at least 6 years and she still treats my cousin’s bf like a girl despite having it explained to her multiple times that he’s a man. She’s definitely a product of her generation, but it’s the refusal to listen and even try to learn that gets to me. Other than that everyone’s been cool with it, though my parents are still slipping up constantly. As for everything else it’s going surprisingly well so far; I’ve already started noticing some stuff that should usually take a couple months to kick in
I don’t notice my gender in most dreams, but there was one a few months ago where I was definitely a woman. That one also convinced me I want bottom surgery, down there just felt right in that dream.
Ah, I don’t think I’ve ever had a vagina in my dreams - I think I have hang-ups about imagining such things, even though IRL over the months it feels like I should have a vagina, and I relate to my male genitals more and more as though they were female.
Congrats on the clarity, it takes some people a very long time to come around.
I’ve had it go back and forth my while life (at least that I can remember). I’m my youth, I mostly was male in my dreams, but had the occasional dream where I was a woman (and some dreams that really should have cracked my egg sooner). I realized I was trans about 9 months ago. By “realized”, I mean that I had been thinking about it seriously for 2 and a half years (and had fleeting thoughts long before that), and 9 months ago is when I was finally confident that it was who I am. Since then, I have dreamt of myself as a woman much more often. I’m on hormones, and I don’t dream most nights (always been like that), but its rare for me to have a dream where I’m a man nowadays, despite the fact that I haven’t outwardly transitioned (only among friends and online am I presenting fem because of some life reasons that make it unsafe right now). I spend most of my time alone in my room, and I present fem to myself in the way I behave, in my mannerisms and such. I have spent a lot of time changing my voice, so when I’m alone, I speak to myself in my new voice, even though I never use it with anyone else in person. I’ve very significantly changed the way that I think about myself, and for me, that has affected my dreams significantly. That’s not to say that just because someone else has a different dream experience that they way they think of themselves is differently than I do. Dreams are a really mysterious thing, and everyone has different experiences with them. They aren’t necessarily representative of your real life, or your real beliefs or thoughts, though they can often be influenced by them.
But I think something that has actually had a significant effect on my dreams is how much I’ve been daydreaming since my realization. In daydreams, I’m entirely in control, and I imagine myself as the girl I want to be. I think that has affected my dreams significantly, and it’s definitely influenced my conscious thoughts. I don’t know if it’s related, but now that I’ve gotten used to my voice, my inner monologue has changed. I’ve almost outed myself by accidentally using the “wrong” voice before because of it, but I really think that it’s a lot of little things that have caused my thoughts and dreams to change.
I think it’s going to be different for everyone. Just remember that your brain loves to use the same connections that it has used your entire life. It loves being lazy and ignoring new things when it can get away with it. Your brain controls your dreams, despite it not being conscious control, so it’s likely to use connections from the before times when you are dreaming. That doesn’t change who you are, and it doesn’t make you any less (or any more) valid. That’s just the brain doing it’s thing; falling into patterns established when it was younger because it likes to be lazy about it.
Some very good observations here, thank you for your encouragement - and I think you’re right that my dream is mostly operating on habit, and it’s just a slow change to those habits. I struggled a lot with rewiring how I think about myself as a part of voice training, because I kept thinking of myself as male I would default to a male voice - in my head and in the world. Even now I guess I am still working on that, but there were months where it was more difficult and unpleasant, where I constantly felt invalidated or like an imposter because I had to work so hard against the seemingly “innate” or more likely just habituated ways of thinking of myself and behaving.
I just felt like certainly I’m not an authentic woman if it’s so hard for me to think of myself as one, right? It really can feel invalidating, but I think you are right that it’s not necessarily some deep truth about who I am that I think this way, it’s just habit - and a habit that I am happy to change, and which I am distressed by having developed in the first place.
It is interesting to me that your internal sense has developed so much ahead of any transition, I seem to be going about this in the opposite way - transitioning first and figuring out my self-conception later. Hopefully if / when you transition that will be much to your advantage, as you will have less tension as everything aligns.
Thank you for the wisdom and kind words 🥰
I’m half way through month 5 and I’ve had a couple dreams with myself as a woman. Probably started a few weeks ago.
In the dream are you like you have always been a woman, i.e. cis woman? I ask because I started to be a woman in my dreams more around 6 - 8 months into HRT, but usually there are still those undertones of fear and imposter syndrome, i.e. I feel it is a very trans way of being a woman in my dreams (just like in reality). I do think I had one dream though where I was just a woman “naturally” without that sense of being an imposter, which was nice though I hardly remember it now. I just remember when I woke up I had the happy realization that in my dream I was just a normal woman.
I don’t remember, it’s been a while now and it’s a miracle I can even remember that detail more than a few minutes beyond waking up.
I came out a little less than a month ago and have had a long time where I never remembered my dreams, but those where I did, I always presented male inside the dream. In just the past few days I’ve started remembering pretty much every dream I’ve had, and in all of them I’ve been presenting fem.
It always felt off that I was masc in my dreams when that did not at all feel right. I have not started hormones yet, only social transition as of now, but it feels very validating in that sense to finally see myself in my dreams as well.
Oh interesting, you seem more able to think of yourself as fem than I am. I socially transitioned three months before I had access to HRT, and during that time I think my dreams were rather vicious and my self-concept was the typical male role that I’ve lived as for so long.
Even now, over a year after starting HRT, I have trouble thinking of myself as a woman while everyone around me seems to see and interact with me as a woman.
I do sometimes wonder if this is because I internalized that every part of me, including the parts I now recognize are feminine, as male - that men naturally would wish to be women, that it’s masculine to think and be the way I am. Changing that perspective seems difficult to me, lol.
Congrats on coming out btw - that’s a huge deal!! ✨ 🥳 🎉
I didn’t start seeing myself as a woman in my dreams until like 1.5 - 2 years in on estrogen. It also bothers me that I can’t remember ever dreaming of myself as a girl prior to transition.
Funny enough, the concept in my dreams is that I complain a lot about getting misgendered (thanks internalized transphobia) but I at least see myself as I look physically in my day to day. For those first two years or so my mental image of myself was my “male” me. 🤮
What do you think changed that resulted in seeing yourself as a woman in dreams? Did it correspond with seeing yourself as a woman outside of dreams, with passing socially, or other changes?
I think like you I struggle with not having dreamed of myself as a girl before transition, and with having a mental image of myself as male (which I still haven’t overcome unfortunately).
Any tips or suggestions would be great, but I wonder if it’s just a matter of time …
I can’t recall exactly what helped change but it definitely for strong after socially transitioning, which I only did after two years on e. It helped that people supported me and saw me as a women too when I came out. I guess I needed the outside validation to help me probably.
My advice would be try to dream journal and/or see if you can realize you’re in a dream and start controlling it, therefore allowing you to change yourself to as you should be. Whenever I have a dream I can control (which is rare) it was helpful to go “this body is wrong” and change over to how I actually was sometimes. I know that is like kind of hard to do and pretty soft as far as advice but it’s what I got . I wish you all the best! 💜💜💜
