4 am wake up, thunderstorm and disturbing dreams. I take my oldest nephew and his classmates to an IHOP, which is also a movie theatre, where some of them get alcohol while we eat and watch a movie with The Who in it. (T recently got busted for getting loaded on a cruse ship, they’ll serve miners in international water – Ah “international” equals IHOP, that’s cute brain). After they all pay their bills there is still ninety-six dollars owning in booze as none of them owned up to drinking and I only have forty something dollars (getting stuck with the tab, rent is coming due and still no new roommate). Earlier in the dream I am having a scotch and water and a women walks up and puts her hand on my shoulder, it’s quite comforting, it’s not a woman I currently know, she stands there for a long time, her right hand on my right shoulder. She has darker hair and I think she’s wearing glasses. Maybe she’s a teaching assistant for T’s class.

I don’t really have nightmares for one key reason – I generally know I’m dreaming and when something gets annoying I change it. I imagine myself with a credit card from T’s school to cover the tab they’ve run up. When I do that I notice that I am at the front of a long line and people are just starting to get impatient. I am suddenly wearing a cowboy hat and I touch the brim in acknowledgement of the people at the back of the line. As I turn back to pay, my dog Sebastian leaps back and forth over the counter and begins to run crazily around the restaurant, which is now overlapped with a park. The people behind the counter are regretting allowing me to bring the dog in, which I didn’t, the people in line are judging me for how poorly trained he is. An elderly woman walks towards me out of the park yelling at me that Sebastian has attacked her little white dog.
Brad approaches with the dogs leash in hand. Brad will let Sebastian chase squirrels by just dropping the leash, I’ll have to remind him not to do that in case this is a precognitive flash. However what this probably is, is an odd reversal.

In the real world Sebastian was attacked in a park by two white dogs when their owner dropped the leash. This was when we first moved from the ville. I was in the basement of our house tinkering and R decided to take him for a walk by her self. It was in the evening I think on a Sunday. She took him up to the local park and this guy who was walking two large white dogs just dropped the leashes, R is not a big girl so she tried to get out of the way as one dog attacked Sebastian from the front and the other bit him from behind. The owner eventually stopped the fight and left quickly without giving R any contact info – we never saw him again. R couldn’t describe the dogs or the owner very well and the police did nothing. We even went on the AKC website to try and identify what sort of dogs they were, but R couldn’t find a match. She picked mastiffs I think because they are large, but I doubt it was two mastiffs.

At first I thought Sebastian was fine, he’s been in fights before, by the next morning there was blood all over the house. I took him into the vet and they shaved his flank revealing several large punctures. There was a hole about an inch in diameter where you could see the muscle moving underneath. They couldn’t do stitches right away, as it was an open wound into the body. For several days I had to keep pouring hydrogen peroxide into the hole and letting it drain. Eventually they stitched him up and he was fine – at least one thousand dollars in vet bills later (back when I had plastic). That was a deep rift for R and I. Sebastian is like a child to me, he’s been a part of my life for almost eleven years. No part of that incident was her fault, but I always felt that if I’d been there it wouldn’t have happened. I’ve stepped into potential dogfights before with my body, I just put myself between the dogs and kick the attacking one off. Maybe in this situation I would have gotten bit, R certainly isn’t big enough to have done anything like that. As a type A control freak I have problems giving up control to other people. It can drive me nuts to ride in a car with a bad driver. But I work at it, I do ok unless I am overtired and then I get very impatient. This incident affected my ability to trust R, to let things go and trust her. It was an open wound for us and I didn’t know what to ad, no stitches, no healing.

So why would I dream that incident in reverse with Sebastian as the attacking animal? Processing an old psychic wound? Transferring my feelings of guilt about not being able to forgive her for something that wasn’t her fault, so that the victim is now the perpetrator? Something I ate? I saw a book recently in the land of the new age, over at Mystic Valley I think, about pets as guides. Certainly Sebastian is a guard and friend for me, he’s kept the house here from getting broken into I am sure on more than one occasion. But would I see him as a spiritual force in the Shamanic sense of an ally? I suppose it’s possible. Not much of a guide though, running around like crazy in an IHOP. He did alter the course of the dream though, which evolved into going to bars in Dublin with my Dad and having cheery pints, until I was awakened by the rain.

I have the shamanic thing on the brain as yesterday my friend John R – came into the center. John is a new ager of a certain type, the macramé necklace, VW microbus, Rainbow Gathering, following the band Fish in lieu of The Dead, rhetoric about “the people,” that kind of thing. He’s a large young man, he stands a proportioned six four and easily must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. He’s twenty-two now I think, and just recently a father. His son was born on John’s birthday just minutes from his own birth time, “In almost the same latitude”. A home birth of course and the doula had her off the bed and wrapping up the sheets ten minutes after the birth, “It was like a dance, she only had to push three times” (she is also young). The doula is from Alaska, where over the past fifteen years she’s delivered hundreds of babies. She will be starting the massage therapy program soon. John’s wife is twenty-one I think, she wears a red paisley bandana in her hair, more tropes of the type. John’s on a Shamanic path, his mentor will randomly show up and meet him all over the country in Castenada like ways. Read A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and you’ll know what I mean.

John brought in a Native American Blanket yesterday that was gorgeous. Nathan is a friend of mine from childhood. His father is an antique dealer who often deals in Native artifacts. This blanket compared favorably to the ones I remember from Nate’s house. It’s a heavy course hair blanket in reds and whites. John handled it with a sense of sacredness and there did seem to be an aura around the item. As he showed it to us he explained that he had traded for it and it was an original of which copies had been made. It depicts a prophecy that ten Shamans will come in a time of darkness and teach the people how to live in harmony with the earth. The ten Shamans are depicted on the blanket flanked by two gate keepers, the Shamans will lead the people to the four sisters who will revive/retransmit the old knowledge. Do you get prophecy in your work place? Tom and I each “had a wrap” where John placed the blanket over our shoulders and wrapped it around us. The blanket did have a presence and as skeptical as I am at times of John and of everything I encounter in the land of the new age, I did feel the shakti of the item. Shakti is like a spiritual charge items that are blessed can get. If you’ve even felt like you were in a sacred space, sort of warm and quiet yet powerful, you’ve felt something of shakti (yes it’s a Sanskrit word, but syncretism is de rigeur in new age land where all traditions are one). I dated a girl, Stephanie 2, who was part of this subculture (Jenny was too). Steph was a Geography major, Karen saw her at Bluberry Hill last year. As I was writing this I was surprised to remember that she was in my dream as well last night, though I am at a loss to tell you in what capacity, I just remember that she was there at one point. I have at times been a happy hippie, maybe I should tread that path with “the people” again.