Do you believe in collective dreaming? By that, I mean different people, who don’t know each other, dreaming roughly the same thing at roughly the same time, the theory being that there is a collective consciousness that expresses itself sometimes in our dreams. An example would be all the people who dreamed about tidal waves or tsunamis shortly before the big one hit southeast Asia a couple of years ago.
Well, I had a dream… (in my mind, I’m waiting for my “emergency contact”, the one I mentioned in What Is Home?, to chime in with I had a dream… in his best Martin Luther King imitation. He always did that, and it drove me crazy, and now, here I am filling it in for him). OK, sorry about that digression.
I had a dream, sometime between March 8 and October 30, 2005, that I believe may have been a collective dream, because I shared it with my wise neighbor, the one who gave me the Eeyore pencils (see What Winnie-the-Pooh Character Do You Identify With?), who also does dream interpretations. She gave me her take on the dream, which I’ll share in a minute, and then about two weeks later, she told me about an email that she had gotten from a friend that I don’t know, that was very similar to mine.
She introduced me to the idea of collective dreaming, and this dream was so powerful for me that I’d like to share it in the hopes of finding out if any of you has had a similar dream during the same time period (sorry I can’t narrow it down more than that. I don’t have all of my dream journals with me). I’d also appreciate any interpretations that any of you may have for this dream. So, here’s the dream:
I was wandering around in the parking lot of an elegant nursing home with white columns. Somebody started talking to me about an elderly woman that I could visit and take care of if I wanted to… that it would really mean a lot to her. I was undecided about whether I wanted to take the task on or not. Part of me would have liked to have done it, but most of me really wasn’t interested.
Later, I was in a Mexican market, and there was an old, wrinkled crone sitting on an overturned wooden crate. I sat on another crate next to her, and was enjoying being in her presence. There was something special about this woman. I knew that she was very wise. After a while, her husband walked by. He was as old and wrinkled as she was. The woman asked her husband if she could sleep with him that night. She wanted to make love to him. He agreed.
I thought to myself that she must really love him a lot, because he wasn’t a good looking man any more. Not someone that most women would want to sleep with. I was also impressed that she had initiated sex, because women of her generation didn’t usually do that.
After the husband left, the woman and I went for a walk out onto the plains, and she turned into a vaca brava… the type of cow that is used to breed the bulls that are used for bullfighting. They are sleek and muscular, and more aggressive than any bull I’ve ever seen. We continued our walk together, and met up with her husband who had turned into a bull. The bull was gathering with some other friends who were also bulls, and over the horizon, we could see another herd of bulls quickly approaching.
There was a bloody war between the two herds of bulls, and the vaca brava and I were in the middle of it. The vaca’s husband was killed in the clash, and she and I made a break for it. We ran away as fast as we could in the direction of the market. At one point, I thought about hopping on her back, because she could run faster than I could, but it just seemed like it would be so disrespectful, so I didn’t.
When I got back to the market, I had lost track of the vaca brava, but there was a station wagon ready to take me away. I jumped in the back of the station wagon. A friend of mine was sitting back there, too. We shut the door, and the unknown driver drove off. I commented that it was a good thing that we had packed our bags before, because there wouldn’t have been time to pack them while we were making our escape.
We drove away into the countryside (in the opposite direction of the skirmish), and followed alongside a broad river valley with lots of green everywhere. We were going to try to make it up to Wisconsin to buy parts for a computer. As we were driving along, I suddenly remembered the vaca brava. I asked my friend,
“What ever happened to _____?” I could tell that she didn’t want to tell me, so I told her,
“I don’t think she’d mind if I knew where she went. She just didn’t have time to tell me.”
My friend said, “She went to Texas.”
“Texas? Why Texas?”
“She said that she thought the people were nice there.”
“In Texas? Maybe in New Mexico…”
END OF DREAM
When I shared this dream with my friend, she interpreted it on a purely personal level. I had two men in my life at the time, and there was some vying for my attention… she thought it was significant that one of my boyfriends was a Taurus, that sort of thing.
Then, a couple of weeks later, she got that email from a friend, as I mentioned above. In his dream, he also accompanied a cow (I’m not sure any more if it was a vaca brava) to a prairie, and there was a skirmish between two herds of bulls in which an important bull was killed, and he and the cow ran away from the scene of the battle together. The main difference between his dream and mine was that he did ride the cow away and I only thought about it but didn’t do it out of respect.
So, here are three questions:
1) Have you had a similar dream, and if so, when?
2) What is your interpretation of this dream on a more universal level?
3) Have you had any other experiences with collective dreaming that you would like to share?
