Dream Animals

Animals appear differently to our dreaming eyes. They are rarely “someone,” sauntering into our nightlife most often with no name, no number to call, or any childhood flashback unlike the usual human inhabitants of our dreams. For this reason, their presence cuts diagonally into the field of dream figures. Without introduction or obvious motive, it feels as though they mean something that is beyond. For the disruptive nature of dream animals to our usual human state has us feeling as though we have met something at the edge of speech, watching from the brush in a world we can seldom access or touch. Where human figures often arrive clothed in interpersonal context such as parental tension, sexual longing, or friendship; the animals at night carry no such language.  

Perhaps a bear in a dream watches you from the tree line. You may be running from it, or perhaps you are not afraid at all; its presence doesn’t ask you to remember who in your life likes bears, or what it once said at a party. It simply is. As though bear-ness itself has erupted into our sleep as an emissary of heavy, stomping paws and deep, guttural breaths from saliva ridden jowls. For this reason we almost never consult what we know about them, but how we feel in their presence. The human figure turns our mind to memory or personal drama, the animal figure pulls us sideways into the rawness of the encounter, leaving us overstuffed with impossible questions: “Why the bear?”, “Why the chase?”, “Why now?” These questions hit dead ends because we can no longer tell a story about ourselves in the midst of the dream animal, only ponder a world beyond the human story altogether.

We might take this presence as a reminder that our dreamlife and waking life are not only a theater of personal narratives or relationships of past and present, but also a wilderness populated by creatures whose existence is self-evident. We may not always be so flattered by the dream with interest in the personal stories and so-and-so’s of our daily life. Animals do not bother with our excuses or stories; their presence is too sudden, too whole, the dream itself remembering for us that life and its inhabitants are older and stranger than our small biographies. The headlong gusts from an eagle's wings beats far past whatever pieces we can put together about our lives; it shines in facts that are self-evident within our very bodies: the rushing feeling of terror up the spine as a bear saunters in our direction, that unsolvable curiosity toward the crow circling overhead that pulls our brow into some wordless furrow, the strange tenderness of the a fox that brushes by before vanishing, or the heart collapsing sensation of a snake under one's feet.

It can be said that these presences exceed us, but they do not exclude us. By paying attention to the presence of the animal kingdom in our very beds, we admit to ourselves on some level that our life is not exclusively about us. Nature and its animals have little care for our interpretations of it, and in that refusal it grants us a chance to meet the world on its own terms. These terms return us to our place, wherever that may be, with man and beast meeting in the same dark woods of the dream. To give these beasts attention is to remember that the dream and our dynamic inner life, like the wild world, is still teeming with untamed vitality. It is enough that they appear without explanation: how lucky are we to know that even through our short and fleeting lives with all of its petty drama, that the wider world beyond humanity has not forgotten us; mother nature and her children knocking at the door of sleep, jostling us into awe and terror alike.