Speaking of Dreams

I feel like dreams are a creative process, so let me share a few recent ones.

1. I have a reoccurring dream that always starts in my own backyard, and for some reason I have to flee. So I run and hop the fence into the neighbor's yard, which is often mostly the same as their yard in waking life. I continue running and hopping fences. This turns into a sort of time/space travel for me and I always end up in some fantastical world. In this particular dream, I soon found myself flying over fences instead of leaping over them. I'm not quite sure what sort of bird I was in this dream, but I know I had wings because I had to flap them. The backyards warped me to a shoddy, rundown neighborhood with front yards of churned mud and clumps of grass. No people seemed to be living in the ramshackle houses, but nearly every yard had one or two equally downtrodden horses, all of them with matted dark brown coats. Groups of people were meandering through the streets and commenting on the horrible conditions the horses were living in, but not really doing anything except for complaining. I flew over them to a grove of tall pine trees and the neighborhood promptly disappeared.

In the pine trees I found a family of owls. I landed near them, noticing that they were somewhat distressed. The owls told me they were being harassed by a Cooper's hawk. They pointed to a nearby branch and I turned to see a rather large hawk (I was about the size of the owls at this time) glaring at us. For some reason, it flew off and left us alone for a while. The owls told me I had to help them collect pine needles. I distinctly remember the needles of the tree we were perched in to be in clumps of three and were rather long. (After using the power of the internet, it turns out these trees were Ponderosa pines and the owls closely resembled spotted owls. It's weird because I don't really know anything about pines or spotted owls, but they do in fact live in Ponderosa pines and their young are sometimes killed and eaten by Cooper's hawks.) I helped them collect some needles and then wished them luck and flew off.

The rest of the dream is fairly jumbled, but I ended up in a different forest and this time I was a moss covered tree-person, sort of Lord of the Rings Ent-ish. I was very disturbed because I could see a road from my forest. The rest is too fuzzy.



2. We were driving up a muddy road to the camp. It was supposed to be a horse riding summer camp, but the place was very strangely constructed with random scraps of corrugated metal and horses with mismatched and dingy tack. The ground was muddy and dented with countless hoofprints. I was assigned two horses, I recall one of them was named Tut. We were to have a race, which started out with people just riding their horses but somehow switched halfway through to horse-drawn carriages. I wasn't able to get on my horse because my boots were too fat to fit in the stirrups, so they gave me a massive camel instead. We raced and raced and raced around the track and it turned out that my camel was able to talk. I don't remember what we talked about, but we kicked the shit out of that race. Some other stuff happened that I can't really recall. Something about green wing macaws and our camp dorm being in a submarine.


I don't know what it is with bedraggled horses in muddy conditions, but that popped up in both of those dreams and I only just now noticed. I've been having a lot of odd and somewhat memorable dreams lately.