Reserve – as in nature reserve

As can be seen from the examples, it can be a place of discovery when explored, or a place of terror. It is a dream situation in which we are on equal terms with our inner the animal nature we carry within us. Usually we want to control wild animals and do so with iron bars an enclosure that make escape impossible, not like in the first example to stop people’s influence to get in. See Animals in your Brain and Animals 

Example: I came across a very large enclosure made of wire, covered above as well so not even the birds within could get out. It felt like an enclosure for animals, like a nature reserve, or special environment. I entered it through a flap in the wire.

Inside the enclosure I saw it was slightly different to the surrounding fields and woods. I didn’t see any birds, but there were many creatures or life forms I had never seen before. One was like cellophane, shaped a bit like a starfish but flat and with rounded ends on the ‘legs’. The creature was on a rock, and I was sure could move. I also saw some creatures with seaweedy texture, with a central part from which many fronds or legs spread. These were fairly solid, and could also move.

Then as I was standing on the higher ground of the enclosure, I felt one of the creatures crawl up my trouser leg. Then there were several on my skin. I realised I should have tucked my trousers into my socks, but it was now too late. I didn’t feel panicked or repulsed by the creatures, but I did wonder how to get them off me. I thought of taking my clothes off to pick them off my skin, though they were not parasites or harmful to me. But I realised if I had my clothes off it would allow more to get on me.

I had a very strong awareness of them on my body, as I suppose one would if any creature that size, about a tea-plate size, clung to one. Then one of them communicated its name to me. It was about three words including the word express – something like Atlantic Express Data. There was no speech, but a definite awareness of communication and intelligence. That was the end of the dream. It reminds me of the snake dream last year.

I worked on the dream and the major understanding came from feeling the difference from being in the enclosure and outside. I had thought the enclosure was to keep the creatures in, but I felt, with emotion, how it was to keep the influence of human beings out.

The farming land all around was so controlled, so changed, so constantly cropped, fertilised, ploughed. While the ground inside was left to be influenced by it natural forces. This allowed creatures to develop that would never have grown elsewhere.

I understood from this that the silence I have managed to find or create within myself is the enclosure. My everyday attitudes are incredibly controlling as far as allowing new aspects of myself to emerge and develop. The creatures are in fact processes that are beginning to influence my body and psyche. I am still tentative about allowing them to be integrated into my conscious self. I felt that they would take about another five or ten years to really develop fully. The changes would produce a self more merged with the collective awareness than I now have, and of course a life that was also more connected.

 Example: I had a dream that I went into a nature enclosure/wild animal reserve with a few friends. I did not know these people in real life but in the dream they were 2 men, one quite reckless, the other relaxed and resourceful. There was also a woman who in the dream was my sister; she was bold, beautiful and fearless. I felt anxious in the dream, with a foreboding that something bad would happen. We were driving a sort of buggy cart, and all the time I kept saying we needed to get back as it was getting late. We carried on. It started to get late as we approached the area where I knew the lions would be. I kept seeing flashes of lions and had the feeling they were hunting us. I became very scared, like my foreboding was coming true. Hearing screams from the reckless man we were with, we realised he’d been attacked and killed, so we tried to escape, we were on foot and losing the light, it was terrifying.

It seems that bold, fearless and reckless were no the right attitudes with which to approach the wild within us. The next example illustrates a different way.

 Example: I was overlooking the forest from inside a building/resort, (stilts levelling the building on a hill/mountainside, so everything was far below me from the window), snow covered pines to my left and just forest straight ahead. As I admired the beauty of the scenery, and eagles flying over the forest, I noticed a pack of wolves far below in the dry area of the forest. A split second after I saw them I was down in the forest right in the middle of the pack. Only a moment of uneasiness took me before I realized, even though in human form, I was part of them and they were part of me. I was one of the pack and feared no danger.

Useful Questions and Hints:

If I was frightened, fundamentally what was the fear about?

Did I explore the dream?

If I felt no fear, how did I manage that?

See Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions