Dream: The Goose Wolves

Dream 20030324, 11:30 AM:

This is an odd dream. The only thing that really ties it all together is the Path. I don’t know where the Path leads, or why I’m going there.

I begin at the beach. I remember sitting on a pier and watching the waves; it seems like I’m watching a sunset, although the rest of the dream isn’t dark. The sky over the sea is all colors of orange and red and gold. I walk away from the beach, and as I go, there is a line of trees, and a break in them where the road goes into the forest, and I walk along the path. The path is about the size of a one-lane country road, and seems sometimes to be paved and sometimes to be sand-floored. There is a young blond woman coming up behind me; she is carrying a huge metal-looking pole. It goes back and forth from looking like a lamp pole, to looking like some kind of spear, with a three-pronged blade at the top end. It is very tall, and appears quite heavy – she obviously has trouble carrying it. It sways back and forth, and several times the top of it falls to the ground and she picks it back up and continues. I am walking, but at some points it seems like I’m riding a bicycle, and at other points it seems that I’m driving a truck. Once, the girl’s spear/pole falls and hits the hood of the truck, leaving a dent. I remark to myself that I’ll be glad when we stop going uphill, and start going downhill, because then my bicycle will allow me to get ahead of her. As it is, if I walk faster for a little bit, I get in front of her, but not far enough to outdistance her. Finally, we crest the hill, and start going downward in a series of rolling small hills, and she disappears behind me.

I continue on the Path, and after a while I decide that I would be able to go faster if I went Tarzan-like on my knuckles and toes. I do that, and sweep along the path quickly. It’s still quite hilly, and now there are some buildings alongside the path. I see a white tiger prowling ahead of me, and it sees me – I am terrified of it, and think to myself, “Oh, no, Sher Khan!” I fall to the ground and freeze, one hand held upward (because that’s the position I fell in) and the tiger approaches. The tiger comes up and sniffs around me, and pinches my upraised hand gently in her jaws – it doesn’t seem like she believes that I’m dead, like she’s testing me, and if I move, she’ll attack, but if I can remain still she’s willing to play along and pretend that I’m dead. It’s a very scary game. Eventually, she sort of winks at me, apparently I’ve passed the test, and she goes on.

Then, a brief flash-back type interlude, where I’m sitting on a bridge over water, and talking with Mom and Dad about how a small white tiger had eaten their clothes on one of their vacations – they had washed the clothes and put them out on a bush to dry, and the tiger had pulled them down and torn them up. In the vision in my mind, it’s a tiny tiger, like it’s a baby.

Then, I’m back on the path. I encounter the white tiger again, but with the same result. Then, I run into a wolf – it seems like this wolf is an old friend of mine, and he runs along with me as I’m loping down the path on toes and knuckles. We talk back and forth like old friends, catching up on what’s happened since we saw one another last.

Then, we go under an “overpass” type thing, where a bridge crosses over the Path. We see the rocks on all sides suddenly crop up with wolves – this part looks very cartoonish. They just pop up over the edges of all the surrounding rocks; there are dozens of them, possibly hundreds. It looks sort of like “Indians attacking the pass” from a Western movie. My wolf friend says that they’re Goose Wolves – and as we watch, they attack a caravan of people, and steal their geese and the goose eggs. The charcoal gray wolf pups each have a little Scotty dog as a “nanny,” and the dogs lead the little wolf pups up to the front, where each one grabs an egg and takes it back, in a formation like soldiers. The people in the caravan with the geese are trying to escape, but the wolves are too fast, and overpower them. They kill the people and the geese, I think, but keep the eggs.

We go through the underpass, and then suddenly the goose wolves are upon us. They have us surrounded. My wolf companion tells the chief, who is obviously a female, that he wishes to challenge them. She thinks a while, and then says that he has to fight six of the wolves, and if he can best them, we get to go free. He agrees, and the wolves start jostling to figure out which ones get to fight. Finally, the first contender, a big gray and brown male, is lined up facing my friend, and I see another black wolf creeping around to get behind my friend and attack from the rear. I stop him; this has to be an honorable fight, and only one of them can come at him at a time. My friend fights the gray wolf, and defeats him; he doesn’t seem to kill him, but he lies down on the ground incapacitated. He fights another and then another, and is seeming worn out. I take his place and fight, using a long skinny hand knife; a wolf lunges at me and the knife takes it in the throat, and it lies down next to the others. They are in a row, as if to make it easier to count. Now, I notice that several of the wolves are pure white, with soft fleecy coats like long-haired sheep. A mostly-white female steps forward, and begins to tell her story – like she needs to explain before she takes her turn fighting. She tells us that when she had joined the pack, her white coat was… and the other wolves chime in, saying it was a defect, a liability. It made her easy to see. But now, they are living in a place of snow (and as I look around, there is snow on the ground – there wasn’t before the wolf fight started) and now she is mother to half the pack because they all wanted to have white pups, and it has saved them. It seems very epic as she tells it. I wake up before that fight begins.