DREAM-INALS: Whales are the new tortoises.
The parade of species through my dreams.
Beginning around age 12--kittens. They became cats and lovebirds through my 20s (although once an owl fought a raccoon to the death, punctured with its sharp beak the soft place in the raccoon's throat, and I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth). Coyotes in my 30s (another story for another time). Smattering of elephants (always starving, last legs, dying, or dead) right along.
Then in 1994 I saw my first bear not in a zoo or circus. In waking life:
True-Life Bear Encounter Anecdote
With my dog Annabelle and a picnic lunch, I was trying to drive to the top of Mt. Hough ("huff") in my vintage VW Beetle along a steep, rough logging road. But I'd come to one ascent I just couldn't get up, and the car had stalled and wouldn't start again, so I let it drift backward to a flat area, parked it, and decided we'd have lunch there, in the woods, near a beautiful clearing carpeted with blossoming balsamroot. It was noon. I sat on a boulder across from the clearing and ate my sandwich while Annabelle, an 8-month-old Queensland Heeler mix, dashed around sniffing things.
When I finished eating I slid off the rock and began walking toward the summit; it wasn't that much farther. I gazed at the sky. I looked at the butterflies. I watched the large cinnamon-colored bear loping in slow motion across the clearing with the sunlight streaming behind it, lighting up the tips of its fur like a fiery halo. Parallel to my trajectory.
About 50 feet away.
Holy shit.
Without breaking stride I turned completely around and walked quickly and silently back to the car. Annabelle had been preoccupied with something she'd found in a hole at the base of a tree, facing away from the bear. Thank God she didn't spot it; she was a hysterical barker. I got us both into the car and then floored it the remaining mile to the top of the mountain. We flew up that slope.
I didn't look to see where the bear went.
At the top we found a vacant fire watch tower, lots of coyote mint, and about a million butterflies. With my heart still pounding out my ribs I stood at the edge of an overlook and looked down on a glacier lake of the purest turquoise I've ever seen.
Heaven.
Now let's go home.
Back to Dreamstuff
After that the bear dreams started. They lasted until we made our temporary move to Bisbee, Arizona, to take some classes in herbal medicine (mid-'97). In the dream that came my first night there, a goofy clown bear was frightened off by a large regal elk, who stepped stage center and simply looked me in the eye.
A elk??
That was it for any animals in my dreams for a couple of years. My first night back in California a mountain lion killed the elk. And so.
Then about 18 months ago that dream came, the tortoise pacing at the transfer station with a crippled owl on its back (a tortoise who is reborn as a young goat when the waiting is over). Since then the tortoise or turtle symbol has cropped up a number of times, most recently (last week) dead. Three new moons ago I received the owl alone--huge, blue, and somewhat dangerous. Not crippled, just immature. (I dreamed of the baby goat recently, too--half grown now, part of a small herd, its family, all of them spotted blue.)
And two new moons ago two blue whales fell from the sky and landed unharmed in a field. The whale has been a peripheral symbol in a couple of dreams since then, but last night it was front and center again. A single whale--I'm sorry, but a whale in outer space.
A Pregnant Cetacean Gestating in a Space Station
And the fetus removed at term--great thick layers of blubber surgically folded aside and the infant removed, because it was about to be sent to Earth.
When I woke up this morning I remembered that Star Trek movie I took my brother to see many years back--which one was it?--where they went back in time to 20th-century San Francisco (hey--I was born in San Francisco...) to nab a mated pair of whales to transport into the future--when whales on Earth had become extinct--to save the Earth from being destroyed (it made sense in context...). And I realize now why the whales in the first dream, the pair of them, fell from the sky--where that idea came from, maybe.
Ohh-h-h-h ...
So whales now, with the owl and the goat maturing. In dreams.
And in life, frogs on my desk. And dead bats in the plant room.
7:26:57 PM 
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