Yoma – Because I help people explore their own dreams I have seen again and again that all the people, animals, places you see in your dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images.
That means that the cruel thing has happened to you, and the dream appears to be an attempt to help you see what really happened.
Also cannibalism in dreams is very different from doing it in waking life. For instance a friend of mine dreamt she was eating her own thighs. Because she had fasted for many days she could see that she was in fact eating her own leg muscles, because otherwise more important body organs would have been used as nourishment.
You start the dream as a scientist saving the worlds animals, which translates as – You are using your rational and investigative mind to try to save your own important instinctive nature. Above all else, we share with our fellow creatures our existence in a physical body we have inherited from a long line of forebears and pre-human animals. From this long past we carry traits and urges, fears and dispositions that underpin our self aware human personality. In dreams, these largely unconscious responses to what we face in life are shown as animals. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/ Your investigation uncovered what had happened to you; your personality has been influenced – kidnapped – by the pain of a traumatic event that happened in your childhood.
There are two versions of the story, a mothering instinct in you, and you view of what happened from the investigative viewpoint. Held as hostage means that because we avoid anything linked with pain we repress it, so in a sense it dies. Eating her own daughter may mean she/you chewed over in your dream/inner self what happed, in order to understand and heal. So you, “got in her place and I was actually the one telling the story, but I don’t know how instead of human legs I had deer legs. And I would run so fast along the forest and kept hearing and visualizing those images of that cruel moment when she/I ate that girl and before I woke up I heard my old scientist voice telling me "that girl didn’t die of hunger, she died of some disease.”
My suggestion is that you really imagine yourself as that girl and her mother and allow any feelings to emerge. It may be difficult because for years you have repressed the actual memory and tried to make it into a story of a girl and her mother. Use
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson and
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/trauma/#ExamplesTony
