Yesterday, I found this drawing of a polar bear while cleaning out a closet. It seemed particularly synchronous as I had just the night before dreamt about a bear (a brown bear, but still) AND the temperatures dropped radically overnight.
I am filming a big brown bear at a safe distance. After a while of watching it travel up a steep slope, I watch it on the video clip on my phone, until I realize that by doing so, I no longer have eyes on the real bear. Where is it? I panic a little and slide into water at the edge of a small lake, as if that offered protection. Even as I am trying to save myself from the bear, I am suddenly consumed with thoughts about drowning myself.
But then I start swimming to a cluster of buildings on the opposite shore and find myself surprised at how easily I get there. I’m not that strong of a swimmer. Something about the sanctity of the body. Inhabiting it. Trusting it to take me to the next safe place.
** The landscape is very like the landscape of the trout lakes up in the Sierras where we vacationed one summer a while back. CALIFORNIA.
** The drawing copies a portion of an illustration to the fairy tale, East of the Sun, West of the Moon.
a beautiful drawing and poignant dream
((Mo))
Baloney about losing readers. I love hearing a dream, especially when someone can express what they were feeling, not just the nuts and bolts. I see this one as about risk-taking. the phases of evaluating risk and rewards. You seem to have come out on top of this venture.
Thanks Deb. I love how dreams bypass our filters and often are
more telling than daylight narratives. Risk taking is a good sense of this. And self care. Something about the disparity between screen reality and reality reality strikes me as important, too.
I read once that Native Americans told their dreams in a circle every morning. Where did I red it? I don’t recall. It was the way the tribes affirmed community. Yours was full of risk and the encouragement of being able to trust your body to pull you through.
I have heard something along those lines as well. It really would be a regular way for a Community to open to the numinous and also to create channels for the “group dream”. Members of my Tuesday group, which I’ve spoken about before and has recently begun meeting again (after a fashion), typically ask for dreams right before a meeting and those dreams get shared in a circle as group dreams. It is a testament to the power of dreaming that the personal images and narratives of the dreamscape invariably speak to others in very moving ways.
That is a beautiful bear. I love the part of your dream where you realize that the narrowed vision through your camera is blinding you to the wider field of experience and possible danger. A metaphorical warning to keep ourselves open.
I’m not surprised jay you pick up on that and articulate one way to hold it so very well, Dana. I found most of “the juice” of the dream right there, too. And not just any inattention, but the inattention wrought by screens. This endless self-documenting is something else (she said commenting on her blog even as others gather for writing class!)
Haha. I hear you, as I obsessively scroll through my newsfeed every morning, but blogging seems like a new opening to me, for which I am grateful.
Oh how easily we are blinded to what is around us. Oh how we are able to save ourselves. Both exist.