I had an amazing dream last night.
It was mostly about a place that I discerned had become a dumping ground for unwanted pets of all kinds.
I ended up in this place after a car I had been driving fell from a spot in the road that had caved in. (The cave-in was unknown to me until the front wheels were already over the edge: I was on a steep hill just cresting its apex, where the cave-in was).
As soon as the car started to descend into the abyss, I was suddenly in the front passenger seat, and my younger sister Jackie was in the driver seat. But she didn’t have her seat belt on, so her head was near the ceiling and her butt was off the car seat as we plummeted. I said, “Jackie, put your seat belt on! Hurry! Put your seat belt on!”
As soon as she did that, the car stopped its descent and began to float gently toward the ground.
When we landed, suddenly the driver was my older sister Laurel, and both her vehicle and mine were at the bottom of this abyss, which opened on a kind of southwest canyonland/northwest mountain-type combination environment. The car we were in was large and it sunk up to its axles in soft, wet mud. The other car (mine) was small and red (it was the one De and Carolyn surprised me with in 1996) and was parked very nearby looking ready to roll.
So I suggested we get out of the big car and head over to mine, so we could drive out and get help.
When Laurel got out of the car, she had a small medium-hair-length dog with her. It took off down a well-traveled path that descended further downward into the southwest canyon-like area. I saw that there was a cougar ahead of it on the path, and worried that the cougar would catch and kill it. But the cougar wasn’t the least interested in the dog or in Lauel, who had gone after her dog. It appeared to be just hanging out and watching the time pass by.
When I looked up, there was another, darker cougar standing not far from me, looking perfectly tame and unruffled. It came over to me but did nothing averse, so that’s when I figured out that this must be a dumping ground for exotic pets and other animals that were no longer wanted by their owners.
The little dog ascended upward on the path and got back on my level, pretty much, and headed into the northwest-type forested area. Laurel followed after her little dog and I stayed where I was, waiting and watching the variety of animals that were roaming around the place. There were ungulates, birds of prey, marmots, and other critters — former pets and wild ones, I assumed.
It seemed a good two hours passed. I realized it was going to get dark soon, so I called after Laurel two or three times to get her to come out of the forest. I realized that the name Laurel wouldn’t travel very far into the forest, but my voice was all I had to reach out to her. (I didn’t think of honking a car horn until just now as I relate this dream!)
At first, there was no response to my calling her name, so I began to get nervous. But eventually she wandered out, dog-less, looking resolved that she had lost her pet to some calamity.
By now both of the cougars — the sand-colored one and the greyish-colored one — were old friends with each other and with me. I didn’t want to leave them but they seemed perfectly happy and well fed and I decided they’d be happier left well enough alone and not coming back with us to be enclosed for the rest of their lives to “protect” them from harm.
That’s when the dream ended. But while I was in it, I seemed to be fully in charge of everything that I could take charge of: my measured response and instructions when the car wfell into the abyss, the way I assessed the cougars the first time I saw them, how to get us out of the scrape we were in (a second car). The only thing I felt I wasn’t in control of was the fate of the little dog.
It was a very lucid dream. I felt I could have stayed in that world of animals forever and been happy as a lark.
