Your method sounds good to me, autolycus.

Regarding the Cher dream...yes, I would think that Cher in the dream represents the female aspect of my own personality. I would interpret it on this basis: that I have a happy and good working "marriage" with my female side, and it's a side of me that carries the kind of strong positive qualities I was seeing in her in the dream.

I believe that all human souls are equally male and female, although you don't see that showing so much in the embodied human and the outer personality. The female aspect is hidden in most men, as is the male aspect in most women. (though there are a few individuals where it's not that much hidden, and you can see it easily) We get incarnated, of course, in either a male or a female physical body, from which point our parents and our whole society get busy indoctrinating us to believe that we are either exclusively "a boy" or exclusively "a girl", as if that was all there was to it. But it's not.

There's a good deal of fear of the other gender that results from society's cultural stereotyping...so you have little boys who go through that stage where they think girls are "creepy" and girls who are terrified that they might have male characteristics (like excessive body hair)...and so on. ;-) Then they hit puberty, and their hunger to reunite with the hidden half of them that they've pushed under, plus their natural biological drives, cause deep attractions to people of the other gender. So we form romantic relationships, get married, have more children.

Biologically, that's fine. It keeps the race going. But I think what everyone's really looking for is to re-integrate all the inner aspects of themselves into a harmonious and balanced One self that unites their masculine and feminine qualities.