There was a sub- or side-dream. A doctor (Richard Dreyfus) and his sidekick visiting patients in a slum. Doctor bounding up the steps to check on his good friend in a tenement, who had diabetes. Coming back out with sadness, because he'd found the man dead. He sat on the top step and wept.

Parents in their late forties, maybe older. A large family. Many grown and nearly grown children. They were moving into the large dark house. Only now it was remote. One traveled days by off-road vehicle and then hiked and rafted to reach it. All the children were tough--they were happy and strong and filled with good humor and love. They couldn't wait to get out of there though and into the populated world. I helped them unpack in the empty old house with its high ceilings and huge rooms. I showed them around. I was surprised; the house had many more rooms than I had thought.

I had brought my cats and I introduced the family to them and explained about feeding them and to be careful of accidentally shutting them in somewhere. The cats, too, were exploring and memorizing their new surroundings.

The woman was pregnant. Too old to be pregnant. But was. The family was splitting up now. The father was taking half the children with him to the city. They were so excited. Or was he taking them all? The woman wanted to give birth alone. Always gave birth alone and unassisted. There was a little girl of 10 or 11 years old. She embraced her mother in farewell. The mother looked into her eyes. "I want you to understand," she said. "This is the last time we will ever see each other. I love you very much." They hugged and the girl ran off to join her father and siblings for the hike out.

There were little subplots like that throughout the dream. The teenaged girls putting on community plays. One of them wild and staying out all night. The boy so inured to remote living he could hike for many days, catch all his own food, sleep on the ground, and so could go anywhere with confidence.

The mother left behind, the family drove on highways now toward a city. It was an old pickup truck, but unfamiliar to the dad. It was getting dark and he couldn't see how to turn on the headlights. Just as he found the switch, a policeman pulled him over. Everyone chimed in to explain about how they'd just bought the old truck and were taking it home. The policeman let them off with a warning.

When they arrived at their new house the children ran around happily. No one in the neighborhood had expected them and two strangers were living in the house already, squatters. The father, it turns out, was pregnant as well. Hence the split, because he too always gave birth alone.
7:28:58 AM    comment []  

In the scary dream that woke me last night at 1 a.m., enormous tigers ripped small animals to bits in the backyard. Between the slats of the window blinds I saw them snarling amid the carnage. But inside the house, and in front of the house, all was serene.

In the dream, on the news I heard an American politician insult an Asian country. The anchorman continued to other topics without hesitating. Behind the house, the tigers paced.

I heard a sound. I looked out the front window as the first planes came over. For a moment I thought of passenger pigeons, how they were said once to have been so numerous that flocks of them passing overhead darkened the sky. These were warplanes, however, and they flew in orderly rows, phalanxes of aircraft so dense and so neatly organized they appeared to be rows of Morse code--or, no, precisely like the tables of hexagrams that fold out on card stock at the back of the Bollingen I Ching. And before long the eastward-moving rows extended from horizon to horizon.

Soon soldiers on the ground were going from house to house taking prisoners, even killing those who resisted. In the dream I had a husband and a little girl, a sweet fragile child of 6 or 7. My husband in the dream was played by Mike Farrell (who played the bland, sweet-tempered B. J. Hunnicut in the M*A*S*H television series years ago). We prepared to flee but only my husband made it out. My daughter and I were trapped in the house, and soldiers approached from across the field. She and I went from room to room, hiding. In my heart I said sorrowful good-byes to our cats and dogs and llamas; I glanced over our packed-up precious possessions and family photos and released them.

We crept up one staircase after another, always moments ahead of the soldiers. I was afraid the child would make a sound, not understanding the peril, but she was so good and silent, even though she seemed unfrightened. Once or twice as we moved about she darted away to do something playful--to swing from a rafter, say--and when I asked her why she would answer, "I just wanted to see how that felt." Higher and higher we climbed, until in the highest attic room we found only a bed's boxsprings on the floor. I lifted it and we crept under, folding our bodies to fit between the wooden supports. Soldiers entered the room. We held our breaths. I expected them to fling over the springs with violence and expose us, but they did not.

They left. We had escaped them. We lived on quietly in the house, without leaving, for some months. I saw a report on TV about families of the killed and imprisoned. In the film my husband stood at the back of a group of mourners, looking anguished, certain we were dead.

A former neighbor who was now with an underground of escapees discovered us and promised to smuggle us to safety, to where my husband was waiting. But she took only the child. I was delayed, and then the soldiers found me. I lived for years then in a prison camp. The movie ended--the dream has become a movie I am watching with my son. It's a harrowing ending. He gets up to leave and I say, "Wait. Watch." And sure enough there is an epilog. We see the woman, emaciated, with shaven head, but all smiles, arrive before a building where her husband and child run out to greet her with embraces.
5:03:50 PM    comment []  

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    comment []  

My grandfather was working hard on the farm, and in his few spare hours volunteered to build homes for the homeless, like a lower-class Jimmy Carter. And somehow then he also secretly owned many houses (bought decades ago when homes were cheap), groups of cabins, a big farmhouse with secret passages. All miles away, in woods, vacant, waiting.

Grandma was elderly, sullen (unlike the real-life version, but much like my very angry dying mother); her right hand dropped off and I saw that it was a false one manufactured to look gnarled and old. My aunt reattached it for her; it was held on with hooks-and-eyes.

I was shoving a huge heavy round oaken table inches at a time down the gravel road to put in the home I would claim. I heard then, but did not see, a train passing to the south of me, hidden behind a line of dense woods. Then a loud grinding metallic clangor as of derailment, then silence. In the east two blue whales fell from the sky and landed in an empty field--whump, whump--and lay there breathing, unharmed. Well, this is confusing! Some dreammaking part of me is dissatisfied with the logic, and so they become enormous sea lions, still blue. Too ungainly to maneuver, they simply lie there, shifting their great bulks.

In the dream we see the compassionate grandfather creating, giving homes and nourishment to others, and over time accumulating houses--security and a kind of real wealth--manifesting this distantly and all around, which he neither acknowledges nor values, so absorbed is he in giving. And the sullen grandmother, disappointed and angry, dwelling mute in her disappointment, sickens and withers and loses her power--her right hand--even, and especially, her creative ability. Her right hand. Her writing hand.

And I find it worth remarking that my other very powerful dream came to me exactly one month ago, also on the eve of the new moon:

Dream of 6/4-5/05

We live in an apartment in a big brick building in some town. (Our bedrooms though are identical to the ones we have now.) I am in my bed and can hear my brother making fearful sounds. He is up and dressing even though it's the middle of the night. I tell him to knock it off and go back to sleep. I am not kind. He comes into my room and stands at the foot of my bed and says "I'm so cold." (He's looking me in the eyes like he never does, with eyes of a normal person, normal intelligence, and great need. He's speaking clearly.) I know this can't be true, because he has several blankets and quilts on his bed.

I follow him to his room and begin tidying up. I see that he's dressed in his dirty clothes from yesterday and I tell him never to do that--always wear clean clothes, how many times must I tell him? Then I notice that the blankets on his bed are lifting and falling--there's a cold wind blowing through them from somewhere. The windows are shut, so what the... ? Then I see an opening in his closet wall. I walk into the closet and find an open door out the other side, wind blowing through it into the room.

I enter the space beyond--it's an attic, a storeroom, but very large and high-ceilinged. Our surplus belongings are stacked up all around, neatly organized in rows shoulder-high and along wall shelves. Narrow corridors between the rows. On top of every flat horizontal surface stands a plant in a pot. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I'd put them there when we moved and forgotten about them--never watered or tended them, pots of dirt with seedlings in them. And yet despite this neglect here they were, a little the worse for dehydration but filled, covered, rife with fruits. Cherry-tomato-sized saffron-colored backlit (from dim premorning light through opened windows) tender globes hanging on hundreds of plants that looked like trees, like banzai trees, like an orchard in miniature, but everywhere. I felt badly about having forgotten about them, but I plucked a fruit and put it in my mouth and it burst with sweetness on my tongue. All these fruits were perfectly ripe right now, waiting for me.

Then somehow I'm back in my bed here. Brian comes into the room lugging his big TV and he puts it on my bed and walks out. It takes up half the bed. I get up and ask him what he's doing. Take this back. What's going on? He doesn't understand what I'm saying. I get impatient. Use an impatient tone of voice. He stands before me, unable to understand me, unable to make me understand, again with the intelligent face and eyes, looking hard at me. He's weeping. I realize what's happening now; I feel such shame for allowing myself to be so distracted from him, so preoccupied with worry, for not always speaking respectfully to him, for not always exchanging the love that's there so abundantly to be exchanged. We put our arms around one another and just hold each other for a long time.

Now he's sleeping soundly in his bed. I pace around my bedroom; it's around 4 or 5 a.m. I go to the window and pull aside the curtain, open it and lean out to look at the quiet sleeping world. (We're on the second floor of the building, at the edge of a town.) It's been snowing lightly; a fine powder of white covers everything thinly, with little drifts against objects. I have an unimpeded view of the horizon. There in the notch between snow-dusted slopes is the setting moon, enormous, but a thin crescent, so slender it's barely visible, the last bit of waning moon. (It strikes me now in writing this that in reality tomorrow is new moon; this would be the waning moon's actual appearance.) This beautiful crescent with snow under and planet gleaming nearby and stars beyond.

And now I see a vacant paved lot across the street... the space there situated directly below that distant view of the moon at the horizon... a single street lamp shining down illuminating the middle of the paved space... Girls, young and very slender, perhaps 17 years old, six or seven of them, are shooting baskets together--practicing in the very early morning. And they appear to be wearing PE uniforms, because they are dressed identically--except that they wear short white sleeveless tunics, not modern clothes. And they are so beautiful and graceful playing together, passing the ball back and forth, jumping, so happy and harmonious in the cold stillness in snow, it's like a dance.

From inside my apartment someone calls out "Sam?" It sounds like a child's voice. I turn away from the window, alarmed. Had I forgotten to lock the door? I go to my bedroom door and lean forward to look down the hall, frightened. But it's an old woman. The Landlady. In her nightgown and housecoat, mule bedroom slippers, reading glasses on the end of her nose. I become indignant and start to tell her she has no right to just walk into her tenants' apartments in the middle of the night, but she gives me a look that's as good as holding up her hand to silence me, and I see in the dim light that she's holding something in both hands. It's large. She holds it out toward me.

It's an owl. Quite large. With vivid bright metallic blue feathers with overtones of purple and aquamarine, black sharp beak and huge black talons. I am given to understand, or I conclude (this woman never speaks, seems almost indifferent) that she's found the owl outside, it's been injured in the violent storm, she knew I was an animal person and would know where to take it. I accept the owl.

Obviously though it isn't injured. Perhaps it's a juvenile in its first flight. But it struggles in my hands. I'm confident I'm holding it correctly but somehow it embeds its talons in the backs of my hands and wriggles free and makes its way up my right arm, flapping and struggling, to the top of my head. One of its talons snags in the flesh of my arm. Then it stands up there and leans its head down in front of my face. I fear it will tear out my eyes with its beak. It could very well do so. I call out to the old woman for help, but she does nothing, just stands there patiently.

Gradually I woke up enough to scribble the dream down in outline. The bird hadn't actually harmed me in any way. It was just far more powerful than I could cope with.
11:49:02 AM    comment []