Blue_Opossum

Pulling Sandspurs from a Wolf’s Fur

Morning of May 2, 2020. Saturday.

Dream #: 19,493-02. Reading time (optimized): 2 min 30 sec.



I am sitting on the floor in the living room of a unique variation of the Loomis Street house near the front door. An unfamiliar man is present to my right (closest to the door). I am stroking the fur of a wolf that is lying on his left side. For a time, everything is relaxing and uneventful.

Somehow, I get sandspurs stuck on me, and they immediately form at least two lines on the wolf’s fur, closest to his back. I determine that they had come from an area on the carpeted floor to my left. I become annoyed, as now I have to pull each sandspur from the wolf’s fur. As I do this, I complain to the man that I had not been outside recently, so they could not have come from me.

As a result of my sense of touch increasing exponentially for a few minutes and establishing a higher level of (somatosensory) cortical arousal, my dream processing changes to a scene where I look out at a parking lot setting from a doorway. A few unknown people are walking around, but a man with an unrealistically big head appears and dances about irritatingly. Using a combination of telekinesis and mentally willing more sandspurs into existence, I cover his body with sandspurs from more than ten feet away as I wake.

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Get the truth about my dream and some of its familiar causal factors here:

My dream’s first scene is a unique but familiar form of a process that occurs at least once every sleep cycle. Often, the first discernible rendering is a result of my instinctual awareness I am dreaming. For example, the wolf is resting on his left side, co-occurrent with my sleeping orientation. The unknown man is to my right, co-occurrent with (in this case, subliminal) environmental monitoring (as my right side is more exposed to my real environment).

Wolves, bears, lions, and most other kinds of animals still occur in my dreams regularly, often as an animal semblance of my reticular activating system as here. However, their nature typically correlates with the ultradian rhythm curve of my sleep cycle. (For example, I had this dream after sunrise, and wolves are nocturnal, and that is how I perceive them.)

Despite my waking-life identity being absent from my dream, there are incidental compartmentalized associations with the coronavirus. (Even so, I have not yet had a dreaming experience with a viable recall of the pandemic. The processing factors of my dreams have not changed at all.) For example, although I have dreamt of cenchrus (sandspurs) before, they have vague visual similarity with the coronavirus. Removing sandspurs from the wolf’s fur also stems from a distortion of Zsuzsanna removing them from one of our cats (a typical synthesized distortion to prevent confusing dream content with waking life).

A parking lot usually only occurs in the last scene of a dream in the last dream of a sleep cycle as liminality begins to increase during the waking transition, and it signifies the status of awareness between dream space and precursory waking space. One association is parked vehicles (the body being motionless in bed). In the real world, a parking lot also represents liminal space.

The man with the big head is a liminal association with a YouTube video I saw yesterday, supposedly featuring a caricature of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in bed with the virus (with doctors and nurses dancing around) even though it was part of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. The character is “out of bed” in my dream as signifying me getting out of bed after waking.

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Ultimately, despite my dreams likely seeming surreal to the average person, they are almost always extraordinarily easy for me to decode and resolve.

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Morning of March 6, 2016. Sunday.



This highly atypical dream state was like a hybrid of a false awakening and a lucid waking transition glitch. The setting seems to be our bed as it is in real life, except that I get the impression or for whatever reason have the false memory of a door to outside being just east of our bed, about where the middle of the kitchen is in reality.

My wife Zsuzsanna mentions something about an animal having gotten in through the window (which does not makes sense as it has a screen). It seems to be a wolf, about twice the size of a normal wolf. However, it seems to be invisible. I try to kick it out of our bed several different times and at one point, oddly believe that I somehow kicked it through the closed door (again, rendered in the wrong location), not breaking through the door (or causing it to fling open) but phasing through it (dream “logic”?). There are at least three “resets” of the situation.

Several times, I thrash my legs around (even though it does not seem I had done this in reality no matter how “real” it felt). The wolf seems to be very tiny at times, though the sheet seems lumpier and higher at other times. I can see clearly into the room, as it is seemingly near dawn. There is no actual attack or implied injury at any point.

Morning of January 15, 2016. Friday.



This dream was really odd in what I first thought was random distortion, though I soon began to grasp at least three layers of meaning in a fairly short time, one layer (the most likely, I think) which I will share here.

I am making love to Zsuzsanna in an unknown and unfamiliar setting - what seems to be a fancy hotel room. The made bed (closer to the cater-cornered door than where we are) has its headboard against the wall. I am directly on the right side of it on my back on the carpeted floor, facing the opposite direction of the headboard (with my feet closest to the table and lamp near the wall). Zsuzsanna is on top, first facing one direction than facing the other (in two different events - the sense of touch and localized awareness of heat being very elevated).

I am becoming more and more aware (though not lucid) and soon notice several miniature wolves (slightly smaller than a cat) running around in midair (at about shoulder height), one directly above the pillow. These wolves are not threatening in any way, just mildly distracting. I start to wonder how many there are or if they will become less chaotic (for example, to form a straight line somewhere).

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My reasoning was almost stumped until my interpretation ability flowed naturally. What do people supposedly do when they want to sleep? Count sheep, of course…miniature imaginary sheep that hop over the would-be sleeper and his pillow and are sometimes imagined as floating in the air. This is inverted on possibly two levels. Instead of counting sheep, I am already in the dream state, so the “opposite” form appears - wolves. They are also not lined up to count, implying the dream continuing without waking (though they still may imply the waking mechanism since dreams often implement opposite “what if” ideas). There may also be an association with sheep as related to the popular non-word “sheeple” to describe unaware people. Wolves imply freedom and intelligence over the unaware conformist. However, something being in mid-air, I happen to know (by being directly told in the dream state) that it may sometimes mean “not getting enough support”, which may relate to my perception of much of humanity as not being very aware - or even interested in their own mind and dream states.

Morning of June 2, 1979. Saturday.



This is a much longer, almost movie-like dream in some ways. The main idea is that I have two very friendly and faithful pet wolves. They are both males (perhaps twin males), I assume, and their names are Lupus and Lee. They save me from problematic events a few times, sometimes from just standing around, based on how potentially trouble-making people react to their presence. At one point, I am in the hospital, which seems like some sort of “replay” of when I had the surgery on my right hand back in 1976. They somehow end up in my room in the hospital and I eventually leave with them a bit earlier than I am supposed to, I think, but I am very healthy later on, and for some reason, apparently had recovered more quickly from being out of the hospital sooner.

They save me from drowning when higher waves rush in when I “fall asleep” on an isolated beach. They are even allowed to be on a city bus and travel with me at one point. Their presence is very vivid and “realistic” and even though I feel like my “true self”, the unlikelihood of having two pet wolves never dawns on me.

There is a seemingly unrelated scene with my best friend making a response of why he supposedly does not have to listen to the teacher. This is the ninth grade class we actually went to (northwest corner of the main high school building), and my last full year of public school. His reply to her is “Because my father is Lucas Taylor, that’s why”. (This was actually not his father’s name in real life.)

This is a time period where I had first begun to find it curious that dogs had usually been more threatening in dreams than wolves and coyotes. In this particular dream, it seems that Lupus and Lee will be my companions and helpers for life - the idea seems very clear and almost like a long-term false memory (even for a brief time after waking).

Morning of April 9, 1966. Saturday.



This, I believe is the first version of this dream, a day before Easter.

I am in an unknown region. There is an isolated house in the forest but near a winding path. Oddly, the house seems “cut in half” in that some outer walls seem to be missing but a family still lives there. The imagery is intriguing and appeared in other dreams with different themes later on, including some featuring the “mystery girl”.

I am aware of a real, living wolf, but am also aware of the “ghost” of Little Red Riding Hood, who is wearing a white riding hood and is mostly glowing all over, a white light with a lighter bluish tint. She seems somewhat sad and lost. I talk with her but do not recall the conversation - there is an unusual awareness of peace at one point as if she is to be a long-term part of my life. The association may be related to a basket she is carrying being filled with Easter eggs, but I also get the impression they will hatch at a later date rather than being eaten. Even though my dream implies she is a spirit and that the wolf has possibly already eaten her, there is still a strong presence of her in my dream. She is dark-haired and green-eyed and very pretty. There is no direct threat from the wolf although I do see it looking down from a ridge in Chipmunk Coulee (recurring).

Interestingly, the only other time I saw this precise dream imagery was of an actual “incomplete” house in a photo my wife-to-be had sent to me many years later. This, like many other dreams, seemed to establish a connection to my beautiful wife (and “dream girl”) a couple years or so before she was even born.

Night of October 19, 1970. Monday.



I am at a cocktail party very late at night on our carport at Cubitis even though I am only a young child. It may be around two o'clock in the morning. I had been playing with a friend (Eddie from my class), with a large, rubbery and mostly hollow all-orange toy racing car with driver (the “midget” kind that looks a bit like a shoe and the person leans way back to drive them). I clearly hear the glasses and ice-cubes clinking and party chatter, and see that everyone is fancily dressed. Suddenly, there is a much enhanced silence as I suddenly feel lucid. My dream becomes extremely vivid, of the “like real life” perception, even after waking. The silence ends with a few whispers and talk of the ghost of a wolf that haunts the railroad tracks just beyond our back yard beyond the usually weedy area. Soon, there is an eerie howl, and the white, glowing wolf moves quickly down the railroad tracks, going south. For a moment, he seems frozen in time in mid-leap. This is not nightmarish at all, but very enjoyable in its intense eeriness and nonthreatening event.

This dream is type EC2. The orange (associated with October, the month of this dream) toy racing car seen at the adult cocktail party on my carport (while fully in-body throughout as a remarkably stable dream self) foreshadows the waking transition as a downsized conduit symbol. The train coming down the track is my emergent consciousness. The ghost wolf that could be perceived as either “leading” the train, or being “chased” by the train is the hybridization of my temporary waking self (a ghost almost always being a thread of the “incomplete” conscious self in the dream state) and sublimated dream self, offset from the adult cocktail party as reflecting the “pack” - yet as a singular ghost wolf. The imagery is beautiful and extremely vivid and seems to occur in infinite night. The transition echoes as an eerie, but beautiful and very “familiar” howling sound.