She turns out to be legion.

I asked Claude AI to read every dream I journaled over seven years and assess every nude I have painted over twenty, and to count the women inside them. The number that came back was not small. Hundreds of them, named and unnamed, real and invented, across over one thousand dreams and three hundred canvases. Legion is the only honest word for it.

But this legion is not an inanimate female. She has to be made of something. So this week I asked a different, more specific question than the last one: who actually formed me, rather than what does my inner feminine look like. If I trace the hundreds of women in my dreams and my paintings back to their sources, whose faces am I actually finding, over and over, wearing a thousand different names?

I came up with five. Here they are, and here is what each one turns out to have given my anima.

Gina, in Every Way

I have to start here with my wife of fifteen years, because she is the only name on this list that shows up complete, rather than contributing a single piece.

When I had Claude meticulously comb through my dreams for every woman who appeared, one thing stood out immediately. Every other woman gets sorted into an essential aspect of myself, admired for her body, or inspired for her mind, or her steadiness of soul and emotion, or a free spirit. Gina is the only figure who shows up carrying all of it at once, in the same dream, sometimes the same sentence. She is not one ingredient in my composite feminine. She is the rare case of the whole woman already standing there, whole, while everyone else in the conscious and unconscious history are still being sorted by essentials.

The paintings agree with the dreams on this, which is the part that still gets me. The canvas that has hung over every bed we have shared, in three states and one foreign country, was never a picture of a room. I only understood years later it was a picture of a feeling, and the feeling was Gina.

Monica Bellucci, in the Physical

Somewhere in the dream journals is a woman my sleeping mind describes only by comparison: she is nude, natural, statuesque, comfortable in her own skin, and I recognize her instantly as looking like Monica Bellucci, a specific, remembered physical being rather than a stranger my mind invented from nothing, borrowed to carry a very sensual charge: a woman fully at ease being looked at. And it is no coincidence that one of my tantric therapists could be her younger sister.

Dream Journal: “Again, not sure. A video I love. I was showing my friends a video I love…Malena, with Monica Bellucci. But instead, suddenly it is a home video I must have filmed over the movie of Gina sitting on a bed in black stockings and heels and bra, gorgeous. Her legs are crossed, and she starts taking off her bra. You can glimpse her nipples and she looks beautiful. I’m embarrassed, but then again, I’m not. Lindsay jokes, maybe you should delete that, but I said, no, I want to keep it.”

Mom, as Inspiration

She shows up in the dreams too, and almost never as she actually looked in my childhood. Young, stylish, purple eyeshadow, slender, expressive eyes, admired rather than simply loved. Later in the record she shows up differently, steadying me, holding my hands in prayer at the edge of something frightening.

I think my mother contributed the earliest emotional essential in this whole structure, secure attachment, long before I had any language for affect, anima, composite or legion. She was the first woman whose attention and affection felt like safety, and I suspect every other woman on this list has had to be measured, at some unconscious level, against that first template of what a woman’s love is supposed to feel like.

The Teachers

These women rarely show up by name in the dream record, and I think that is its own kind of evidence rather than an absence. Some of the most formative women in a boy’s life never make it into his mythology loudly. They arrive quietly, in a classroom, and hand him permission he did not know he needed, to be curious, to be sensitive, to be good at something that had nothing to do with being tough.

I cannot point to a single dream and say, there, that is Ms. So-and-So. What I can say is that the part of my inner feminine that is curious, that believes in potential before it has proven itself, that wants to sit down and actually teach me something rather than simply be looked at, almost certainly has their fingerprints on it, even if their faces never made it into a single one of my one thousand nights.

Melissa, the Confidant

She is the only one on this list I have already written an entire essay about, because she is the living proof that a powerful woman does not diminish me, she enlarges me. Thirty years of friendship. Mountain cabins alone where we talked until we lost track of the hour. A woman who preaches better than almost any man I have ever heard, who left a pulpit rather than shrink to fit a frightened pastor’s comfort, and who is, right now, watching a song she helped remake climb the charts with the exact meaning restored to it that used to be denied.

In the dream record she appears constantly, sometimes tense, sometimes warm, occasionally startling and sensual, and I think that range is honest. Melissa is the essential of my feminine that is not necessarily about being soothed or desired. She personifies the essential that is about being free, she insists I keep stretching the boundaries.”

Is She a Composite?

Here is my answer, and I did not expect to arrive here when I started the question.

Yes. But not scattered the way legion makes it sound. Five real women, a wife, a stunning human of beauty, a nurturing mother, a handful of quiet teachers, and a friend who has never once let me get away with playing small, run through twenty years of paint and seven years of unsupervised sleep, and what comes out the other end is hundreds of variations on five original notes. That is not chaos. That is what a long life does to a small number of foundational women, once art and dreaming get their hands on them and start integrating.

I do not think this makes my inner feminine any less mine. If anything it makes her more mine, because now I can trace her. She is not an abstraction I borrowed from a theory. She is Gina’s wholeness, Monica Bellucci’s ease in her own skin, my mother’s first template of safety, a few teachers’ quiet permission, and Melissa’s refusal to let me shrink, run through the strangest, most honest instrument I own, which is apparently my own unconscious mind with a flowing paintbrush in her hand.

I am sixty-eight years old. I went looking for my feminine identity, once a stranger, and found five women who have made me whole.

This is the eighth piece in a series that began with an essay about why conservative men fear powerful women, and has moved, one week at a time, toward the mirror none of us wants to hold still for. If you are new here, the first seven are:

Why Conservative Men Fear Women · Why This White Man Loves Powerful Women · She’s a Man: The Last Move of a Frightened One · Who’s Selling These Men Their Rage? · Wrestling with Masculinity · A Man Wrestles with Femininity · The Man in the Mirror