I have paid attention to my dreams since I was a child. When I turned 21, my birthday present to myself was a weekend dream seminar in Esalen in Big Sur on lucid dreaming. I drove up in my '73 VW Bus, picked up a couple hitchhikers in Santa Barbara (turned out they were on their way to Big Sur too!) After that seminar, I thought: I could spend my life studying this, it's so fascinating. For years afterward, I went on to do other stuff, but I continue to try to remember and write down my dreams and think about them and what they might mean. Of course listening to someone recount their dream is almost worse than listening to someone recount an amazing hallucinanagenic drug trip. I'm pretty sure there are some pretty good memes about that and even a Saturday Night Live.
The dream I had last night, though, is rare for how gruesome yet succinct it was. I woke up a bit shaken from it. Here's what I wrote in my journal this morning:
I am in my house (which is not exaclty my house). I I can see some of the neighbor's yard: they have pretty thick trees and shrubs, and I hear their children playing outside. And then I see a bear, catch a glimpse of it, and I say aloud or just think, Oh My God, a bear. And then I see the father come into the yard and there's commotion and yelling and screaming, and then I see that the bear lying on the ground and the father is trying to bash its head with a wooden bat.
There's more commotion and yelling and screaming, and I look over the fence and see a torso with only one leg attached. And the another man (the father's friend or brother?) is saying to the kids that their dad is not going to make it, that they should say goodbye... I start to say over the fence that I'll call 9-1-1, but then I realize it is too late.
The father who was mauled by the bear, I'm very much aware in the dream that he is not a good father, not nice to his kids. In fact, I'm aware that he was awful to them--but now he's dead. When I'm writing the dream in my journal this morning, I think to myself: At least he tried to protect his children from the bear. And then I think:
Maybe the bear came to protect --and free-- the children from their father.
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