The owl and the bear

Mike Clelland sent us the following story from his Hidden Experience blog about a dream featuring an aggressive bear. When I read it in e-mail, it was the third reference to bears I’d encountered that morning.

First, while meditating shortly after getting up, a memory from long ago popped into my mind. A friend and I were camping in Rocky Mountain National Park when a bear entered the camp at night and ripped a hole in our tent, trashed the campsite, then fortunately left us alone.

A couple of hours later, at the gym, one of my yoga students told me she was leaving for North Carolina for the summer. I asked where she resided in N.C. and she mentioned a rural town outside of Boone. She described the natural beauty of the area and added that there were bears in the nearby woods.

So when I read Mike’s e-mail about this dream, I knew I should post it here. Actually, it was the owl that was both in and out of the dream, as you’ll see, that fascinated Mike. And, appropriately, I had copied a photo of the above mural, featuring an owl, a couple of days ago to save for a future post.

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“The dream started in a bland suburban setting, and I was standing out in the driveway of a house that I assume was mine. The other homes were spaced sort of far apart, it was summer and the lawns were green. The sun was low in the sky and everything was calm.

“Then I saw there was a grizzly bear poking around on the lawn across the street! At first I didn’t feel nervous or threatened, it was an amazing sighting. Then I realized this big thing was sort of lumbering towards me, and I retreated into the garage.

“I went into the house through the inside garage door, but I realized there were a bunch of doors from the garage into the house (I think as many as six), and they were all slightly open. I quickly went into one as the giant bear entered the garage. I locked it from the inside, but typical of this kind of anxiety dream the whole thing felt awkward and frustrating, I needed to force the bolt in place.

“I went to each door, one by one, and locked it from the inside, and each door was progressively more flimsy and each lock was harder to latch. I could tell the bear was right outside each of these doors. Just like me, it was going from door to door, and each was just a little bit open as I got to it, so I could see the bear as I pulled it closed.

“Eventually, the doors would just barely close, as if they were sized wrong for the frame. The locks were broken, and parts would fall off as I tried to get them to work.

“The final door was nothing more than a small sheet of thin plywood, far too small for the door frame. It was barely hanging in place on deteriorating hinges. The plywood was warped and rotten, and I could see the bear over the top and sides of it, slowly coming towards me, then his big paws were reaching through the open spaces as I frantically tried to somehow get it locked.

“Suddenly I was hearing the hooting cry of an owl, steady and clear. I could hear it as this bear was pulling at this thin sheet of plywood with it’s claws.

“It was at that point I woke up, but the hooting continued. I lay there in bed, with the pale light of dawn easing through the only window in my bedroom. I was hearing the unmistakable call of a great horned owl, and it must have been on the telephone pole right outside my window.

“I lay awake for a long time, deeply impressed at the symbolism of the dream, and that a real owl would invade my dream-scape just as a bear was about to pull down the final flimsy barrier between me and it. (Bear? Barrier?)

“I have lived in this cabin for over 20 years, and I’ve occasionally heard an owl, and very rarely seen one nearby. But starting at the end of March of this year, I’ve been hearing them outside my bedroom window and they’ve been waking me up, something that’s never happened in the decades I’ve called this my home.”