Friday, November 09, 2012

Dreams of Horses and Native Americans

Long, complicated series of dreams last night....

The dream was in progress, something about a make-over team remodling our house. Then there was a transition...




I was going to a school of some sort. I wasn't a student, and now that I think about it, I don't recall why I was going there. The school was a giant black cube (which didn't remind me of The Borg in the dream) which rotated. (In waking life I'm more reminded of a rotating castle in the Arthurian romance cycle).

 
The interior of the Rotating Black Cube School wasn't always consistant. The first floor seemed more like an outside courtyard than the interior of a building. There was a red stone fountain with carved horses. The water was pretty still, so calling it a fountain is a stretch, maybe well would be more accurate. A freize of running horses sprang up over the still water. The water was brackish because a cupful of ocean water needed to be added to the basin or the horses would fade from red horses to pale white ones. It was not desirable to have the horses turn pale white for some reason.

I walked along a hallway, which was decorated at the corners with stone-carved art-deco snakes framing the hallway. They were very angular, with 90-degree angle turns and a straight run of snake body ending with the open-mouthed heads on the floor.

I went up a floor to where a teacher was reading from a book to a bunch of second or third graders. I have a sense of wooden chairs with some textured carving on the seat backs. Suddenly, the building began to rotate--this manifested as a sense of dizziness and the scenery outside the window moving.
Throughout the dream, the building would turn suddenly. The teacher said something about not liking how the building spun.

I went up another floor. I was in a large, dark room. I have a sense the walls were made of stone. The only light coming from the room was from a doorway cut into the wall and a square window cut next to the door. The doorway opened onto the air, and I had a slight sense that this was like an elevator anxiety dream, only without the elevator. Some women were with me in the room, and we were all a little worried that the building would spin so quickly that we would be thrown out the doorway and fall onto the ?sharp rocky cliffs? below.





There was a transition, or else I'm missing a piece here. I think the same people (mostly women) in the dark room from the scene before were now either on a rock in the middle of a river, or on a narrow beach between a dark, rocky cliff and a river.

A white horse appeared. It might have been swimming in the river. Or it might have been on the shore below us some how. It was very thin and thirsty, and we had to give it water. The gaunt horse opened its toothy mouth very wide, and we sprayed water into its narrow mouth. I'm not sure how we did this, but the image that sticks with me is looking down on a narrow, bone-white horse's head pointing up to the sky, mouth open with its tongue stuck out, while five or six different streams--as if from garden hoses turned on full blast--from above converged on its mouth.

Then there was another transition. The building (or cliff) started to rotate and we were all in the river. I got stung by jellyfish in the river; it didn't hurt that much, and I was more surprized that jellyfish were in a freshwater river than anything else.





I woke up enough here to remember that I wanted to remember the rotating school with the horse fountain and snake halls. Then I went back to sleep.





Somehow I ended up at some place like Arcosanti or Reed College. I think the buildings were like a college campus, but the location was in the Arizona area (or something). There was a Native American there in a stereotypical headdress with long feathers. We were friends.

"[A mutual woman friend] says you're leaving for good," he said to me as we walked hand in hand in front of a brick building. (I remember that his hand was big, warm, strong, and not boney as we held hands.)

I told him that I was leaving.

"I thought so," he said. "Listen, there's something important that I need to tell you..." -- and then I woke up.





I remember thinking it was a strange dream, because I usually dream about "Magic thespians", not "Magic Indians" and I am slightly embarrassed to be dreaming a cultural cliche.

The spooky coincidence was that when I got home and looked at the mail, the US Treasury had sent Mark a coin catalog. On the outside of the envelope was a stereotypical Native American in a headdress, a freize of horses, and a larger horse looking at the Native American.

Mark joked later this evening that the treasury was using psychics to sell their collectors' coints.