Dreams of Animals

When I was a teenager, my father told me about a dream he had had. The memory stands out, in no small part, because it’s the only time I recall my father telling me about a dream. It stands out, too, because the dream was about me.

In that dream, there was a bird in the window. I forget the particulars but maybe it was nesting there, or fluttering in some state of suspension, half inside, half out. In my visualization of the scene, it happened in my childhood bedroom with the perpetually dusty windowsill, over the stringy yellow carpet we never vacuumed.

There was a bird, my father said, and while he was considering how to get rid of it, I came at it. I slammed a pillow against the bird, its chest, its head, and sent it plummeting to its death in the yard twenty feet below.

My mother intervened in the story, perhaps trying to make sense of it in an honest interpretation, perhaps scrambling to spin it. “Your dad thinks of you as a warrior.”

The dream must have rattled my father. To not only speak of it, to carry on and recount his own feelings from that scene. “I felt bad for the bird.”

I understood him. That though I remained a gangly, quiet, largely unassertive kid, the world was coming for me. We had started our not-yet-legal driving lessons in vacant sections of the shopping mall parking lot, and he had seen me grow frustrated at his instruction and lay my foot a little heavier on the gas to take a turn more sharply than I ought to. A new obsession with basketball had lent me a habit of dribbling an old Nerf soccer ball around my room. I was growing up and my father--or at least his subconscious--recognized my potential for calamity and disaster, less out of design than poor judgment and poorer communication, entwined in a body that was evolving from boy to man, enabled by the onset of meaningful responsibilities in my life.

My father didn’t see me as a warrior. He saw me as rash and blunt and awkward enough to murder an innocent bird before he could enact a more prudent and humane course of action.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that it was only a few nights later when I dreamed of another animal intruding on our home. This time it was a foot-long lizard--bizarrely out of place in our upstate New York habitat--and for some reason, in this dream, I was convinced it was an insect, and I needed to squash it. I folded my hands together, interlocking fingers and came down on the creature’s back. Sometime between devising my plan and making contact, I recognized how foolish it was. That this was not, in fact, a bug, and that I was not coming down with enough force to meaningfully hurt, much less kill a creature of this size. I pressed down and like my non-dreamt rubber alligator of similar proportions, the creature deflated in the middle, beneath my weight, puffing out gently at each end where the air had diffused. The lizard turned on me, though, not with alarming speed or aggression, perhaps because in this dream space I was not equipped to combat it. The lizard’s mouth latched onto my neck, toothless, and began to suck at me. I couldn’t pull him off and became aware that the creature was sucking away my life, and I would die on that kitchen floor without assistance.

My mother and father were there and cognizant of what was happening. They chastised me for attacking the lizard in the first place. It was unclear if they’d help me.