I fell asleep to this video about a woman being struck by lightning, which must have partly inspired this dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhOb63E_do).
DREAM
I'm with a small group of friends at an outdoor encampment. One friend is doing the dishes. I don't like what I see. A huge, expensive, copper pot I've brought with me looks deformed as my friend scrubs the exterior. It was perfect when I brought it here. I choose not to say anything. I come back later as she's drying the pot and I see that the metal lid has warped, and there are patches of melted and soldered metal on the bottom. I laugh, in spite of the expense. Because it's my friend. This just seems to be the kind of mess she'd get into.
Then I see a map of four small towns in Alaska. I see roaring, green-gray water in one corner. A patch of fireweed in another.
Then I'm in one of the towns--a town of lavender. I see a field of wildflowers demonstrating the town's natural beauty.
A tall, middle aged woman with brown hair has been struck by lightning. When this happened, it created an intense psychic connection to a big, long, white dolphin who is now like a soulmate. I see the dolphin cut in half alongside the woman.
The woman and her dolphin are in an icy bay. A rope runs from the dolphin's head and drags the woman, who stands on an ice floe in her tank top and shorts.
The dolphin swims up to me with a small, furry, brown animal in its mouth. I get the dolphin to open its mouth, and I pull the animal up onto the snow. It's my cat, Peaches. She's half dead. I can't help but feel that it's the dolphin that almost killed her, and I'm angry at it. But I know the dolphin is a precious, perhaps sacred animal, and I know it is still just an animal itself.
The dolphin returns to the woman across the bay.
I breathe through a fine mesh for a tent, like a mosquito net. It's quiet. Meditative. The mesh doesn't impede my breath. The veil is almost refreshing.
INTERPRETATION
I think there's an acceptance of both the nature of the dolphin and the nature of the friend who warped my pot and injured my cat. I think there's an acceptance of the whole situation of warping and damage and injury.
The state my cat was in in the dream reminded me of just how sick my cat was in real life a couple days before we put her to sleep. I think there's an inclination to cling to every moment with a sick pet or loved one, and in my past, there's been a scrambling to blame others for their deaths--as if it wasn't natural, inevitable, and their time. The hospital gave them pain killers and that hastened their death. The cat would have survived another couple weeks if we'd just kept chasing her down and stabbing her with a needle for subcutaneous fluids while she cried the most confused, pained cries.
I don't just see this tendency in myself. I recently recognized this same exact pattern of desperate searching for causes and blaming and feelings of guilt in a friend who called me about some deaths in her life. I think I want to let go of that inclination towards denial and blame in the face of serious illness and death.
I have a pet right now. The last time I took him to the vet, they called him a senior. I don't want to be as confused and blindsided as I was with Peaches when it's his time. I don't want to be confused and blindsided when it's my own time. Or when my friends and loved ones get sick.
Injury and deformation are a natural part of this life. In the case of my friend deforming the pot, there can even be something joyful in understanding and contemplating the story of it all.
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