Dream Journal. Day 75 of Juice & Smoothie Feasting/Fasting 14nov11
[In this dream journal, I recall a dream & it then takes me way back into my childhood & a couple of major traumas. Sheesh! is this what Mette was talking about - clearing out childhood baggage (‘shit’)? Seems more about dogs than my feasting/fasting.]
“Skeena is happy”
(Background: Skeena, a Great Dane whom I rescued from Washington State in 2001, when she was 2.5 years old, died this past July 25th at the very ripe age of 12 years & 9 months old. She & I were so very, very bonded.)
In this dream, I am visiting a small community - I think it is down-Island. I am in perhaps a home-based business of some kind. There is a large compound or hanger-like place attached - fairly cluttered with massive tools or machinery & other stuff. Dirt floor.
I discuss ordering something thru the people there - something that will come by bus & ferry (which makes it sound as if it's to come from Vancouver). They have a dog - tho I cannot remember what the dog looks like. They never let the dog off the leash except in the house - not even into the compound area that is enclosed by building & fence. I am upset for the dog.
They go off somewhere, leaving me on my own. In the large compound area I see Skeena lying down on her side, stretched out, intertwined with another dog - a large dog, tho I cannot now visualize the dog (again!). I approach Skeena, so happy to see her. She too is happy to see me, tho not desperately so.
When the people come back (no faces to them, but I think a youngish couple, a man & a woman - the man might be my brother Graham, now I think about it, tho he would never put a dog on a leash or restrict it's freedom), I ask them about Skeena. They tell me who owns her, also telling me, with strong disapproval in their words, that the people let her sleep in the bed with them. That is all I need to know - I am happy for Skeena - she is with people who love her (I believe it is crucially important to have dogs sleep near or with us in the same room, for they share our consciousness & are bereft when separated from us).
This is the first dream I can ever remember in which I do not feel the need to rescue one of my dogs. (This goes back to when I was 17 years old & my family lived in the bush in the Chilcotin Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. I went to school in Vancouver & while I was away my parents packed up from our home-built log house in the bush & left. My dad apparently burned everything that was mine, including all my childhood diaries, poetry, writing, drawings, murals I had painted for school, letters I had received from friends in Iran - everything - in essence, my childhood, my identity. They packed up everything that was left, including our dog, Keela (see the resemblance in name to Skeena?). Keela was a huge shiny black dog, who, years after I realized was probably a Great Dane crossed with Lab. He was absolutely bonded to me, although my dad would not accept that from what he considered a family dog & did dreadful & cruel things to both Keela & me to try to break that bond (which of course did not work).
Me with my brothers, taken during the summer before I went off to school in Vancouver. I would have been 16, ready to turn 17 at the end of August. (the photo would have been developed some time after it was taken)
Anyway, they packed up what was left after the burnings into the Land Rover Jeep, drove the rough six-hour trip to Williams Lake &, according to what my brother Graham told me years later, sold everything, including the Jeep & Keela to a junk yard dealer for $200. Graham told me that Keela had been chained to a doghouse for the rest of his life & that he became utterly savage. That was fodder for nightmares for most of my adult life - always trying to go back & rescue him (as I write this tears & grief re-arise).
In retrospect I wonder if that is why I am so drawn to Great Danes - my heart just goes out to them - I've never met a Dane I did not instantly love. (Wow! I am only this moment realizing that for the past 18 years my husband & I have had rescued Danes in our life!)
In so many dreams, I have come back from somewhere after having left my dogs with someone for safekeeping, or after having given them away to someone, wanting my dogs back & discovering they were in abominable situations (my complicity in Keela's fate - by leaving him behind?). I have desperately tried to get them back, rescue them. (Amazingly, in some dreams, I would come awake, feeling inconsolable grief, fall back to sleep, with intention, & manage to rescue my dogs.)
In one dream that has stayed with me, my mother was talking to a couple of other women & I kept trying to get her attention, trying to find out where the dogs were, while she kept brushing me off & returning to her conversation. Whew! As I write this I am for the first time realizing that at some deep, until now, non-verbalized, level I have ignored my mother's complicity in this terrible, terrible end for Keela - tho I realize she likely did not know what his fate would be. In retrospect, I see that my mother turned away - both figuratively & literally, from terrible things my father did to dogs & to his three children.
(Christ! A memory from when I was about 7 years old: in Heliopolis, Egypt, on the street in front of a neighbour's house. I remember a lovely, tree-lined & wide, shady street, gardens, fountains, houses with glorious yards (but see from a photo the street was barren although the enclosed yards were lush). The Egyptian neighbour was taking my two brothers, me, & her children out for the day. We were all rather dressed up.
My mother was standing talking to at least the neighbour woman (I cannot remember if there were only two women or more - but the body posture - her back to me, animated in her conversation, is the same as in that awful dream!). A street vendor approached the neighbour woman. He was selling geese. They likely would have all been tied together by their feet & hung upside down over his shoulder or the handlebars of a bicycle. The neighbour woman bought one. The vendor set his stuff down, chose one of the geese, set it down & slit the throat . I watched as the goose, in shock & bewilderment, raised its wings, opened its beak wide, trying to get breath. It took a suspended moment before the blood came rushing out & the death dance began, the goose, flapping & the blood spraying terrifyingly everywhere. Is it my memory, distorted (probably!), that made it seem that I was the only one noticing this goose dying? In my mind's eye I see my mother, her back to me & the dying goose, engaged in conversation (I know my mother was sensitive to animal suffering; she likely made a concentrated effort to not notice - aware that to the Egyptian woman this was normal stuff & that she was an invading English woman with her own ideas of 'civilization'.). The goose died a gruesome death - imprinting me for life. The neighbour woman had the cook prepare the goose & sandwiches were made to take with us for the outing. I would not have any of the goose sandwiches so I was given a string-bean sandwich!
By writing this I am drawing so many threads together. My mother's apparent indifference to the plight of animals or her children - though I realize she had her own inner struggles - she was besotted with my alcoholic father & was so worried about losing him & or being on her own that she allowed him to do dreadful things to us & to family dogs. (My mother, like a disproportionate number of women who did not intervene on husbands who abused their children & animals, died of cancer at the age of 68.)
So, way back to the initial dream - “Skeena is happy” - seems like perhaps resolution - or at least confronting - of several childhood conflicts. Way back when I took dogs into my life (I was about 30), I determined that I would not abandon them as my parents had abandoned their children (rather oddly, or perhaps not, I have no children of my own - my only children have been dogs; my father so abused my maternal capacities as a child, always with dogs). And I have kept that promise. All my dogs over the past 35 years have died with me. But I still regularly had dreams in which I was trying to rescue various dogs.
This is the very first dream in which the dog in question did not need rescuing - Skeena is happy in this dream. This is resolution.
Is this what my friend Mette was communicating to me - the need to go so very far back & confront those childhood traumas? Egad! So many years! & where I was thinking I would ‘deal’ with all this someho, it comes in a dream, which hardly seems of my doing or within my control. In fact, if that dream had occurred earlier in the night rather than just before I woke & was able to remember it, all that clearing would have been beyond my conscious mind. Perhaps that’s how it is. I suppose this might also be about simply letting go - which is not as simple as it sounds. Letting go of blaming myself - perhaps of blaming my mother - although I doubt so long as I am alive I will let go of blaming my father, despite knowing he came from a traumatic childhood perhaps even worse than the one he inflicted on his family.
It was my mother, may she now be resting in peace, who said, “Pat, the subconscious is the true consciousness.” In our conscious state, we are so rife with denial & defensiveness that we live bound by lies.
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