All DJ Entries

April 23, 2010

Synopsis: A couple of short dreams about visiting foreign places. Jaguar worship and monstrous bears.

Jaguar
In the dream a friend of mine was explaining that EVERYONE who lives here has a jaguar statue. I didn't believe her at first because usually when someone says "everyone", it's an exaggeration.

But she was right! We drove around the streets. The houses are on hillsides surrounded by big leafy plants. It reminds me of Puerto Rico, but I know this can't be Puerto Rico because I remember that I was visiting a country foreign to me. But it definitely has that mountainous Central American feel. And sure enough every house we drove by had a statue of a jaguar or a black panther. And each house sported their own style. Some statues looked mayan, some mimicked hello kitty, some look like that good fortune chinese cat. But every house had one!

In the next dream a tourist guide is helping us find our cabins, and again I feel like I'm in a foreign place. We look on our cabin map and it looks like there's a couple of cabins we can choose from. What we didn't know was the cabins are actually caves. We find our first cabin/cave, and the first thing I see is a giant warning sign. The cave next to us has MAN EATING bears and a fast rapid cavernous river inside. Are we really safe in our cabin-cave, so close to the man eating bears?

Theres no door, just a long cave entrance that winds it's way down to our living quarters. The cabin uses all of the natural walls of the cave and has a giant spiraling passageway leading to rooms. It would be beautiful, if it wasn't also extremely dark. We decided this cave-cabin was too big and dark. We look at our map and locate a smaller one to stay in.

We only had to take a few steps inside this cave-cabin to find fresh corpses . Mangled and ripped apart bodies. The bear was here, actually, the bear is still here.

I wonder what place I'll visit next

This is the third dream I had on September 21st, 2009.


I am at Lake Whittaker, the trailer park my parents go to every weekend in the summer. The park looks as it did as I remember it when I used to go there regularily with my parents when I was younger. My parents and I are in our old 1986 Westfalia and are parked down the hill, a few lots away from our actual trailer in a lightly forested area. The forest is similar to the one my aunt was dragging me through in the previous dream. Many of the lots surrounding the one we are on are occupied and everyone is inside their trailers or cars because there is a large brown bear on the loose.

The creature is going from lot to lot roaring and scratching and shaking the trailers like it is trying to get in. When it comes to our Westfalia my dad tries to put it in reverse and drive away but the bear has no problem grabbing onto the vehical and keeping us in one spot. It shakes the van violently and almost flips it over before losing interest and walking over to another trailer and attacking it. Several men, including my father, sneak out of their vehicles and quietly make their way over to a creak to the left of where we are. There are men handing out semi-automatic weapons to kill the bear. Many people are armed and head back towards the lots where the bear was causing trouble but it is now nowhere in sight. I am relieved because, even though I was scared, I did not want to see one of nature's creature be injured or killed.

Some time has passed and the trailer park is still trying to recover from the bear attack. Trailers, vehicles and trees have been badly damaged and many peopler are still trying to clean up their lots and repair the damage done to their property. I am at the park by myself now as my parents and the Westfalia are gone. I am walking from lot to lot looking for large peices of wood, either as fuel for a fire or peices large enough to carve. I come across a lot where a medium sized, grey barked tree has been felled and a man who looks like a young Steve Smith (Red Green) is cutting it into sections. Beside his trailer lot is a cemetary containing small gravestones dating from recent times back to hundreds of years. The graveyard is surrounded by a low iron fence and much of it is covered in autumn leaves that have fallen to the ground. I look around a bit before I start helping the man section the tree but I have a small hatchet while he has a chainsaw.

The man's wife, a portly woman with short blond hair lights a coleman stove and cooks up some hotdogs. Many people come to eat but the woman doesn't offer the food freely and people have to pay. Apparently many people in the trailer park are starving because they haven't been able to get their own food because they have been too busy trying to make repairs their lots, or as the case with many of them, for some reason they do not know how to cook. I realize that I myself am very hungry but only have small change on me and cannot afford a hotdog. The dream gets blurry and I cannot remember a bit but there is someone about me freely giving what change I have to the lady, but not getting a hot dog, but not being bothered by it.

Because I am starting to stave I decide to go fishing in the lake. I stand on the shore at the boat launch and try to catch some fish, even small crappies because I am so hungry. Three or four people come down to where I am to watch me fish, hoping that I will give them some of my catch. I do catch three small fish and take them back to my trailer to skin and cook, but because I am not the greatest at preparing fish and because they are so small I do not get much meat off of them and what meat I have I give to some of the starving people in the park because they cannot fend for themselves and I feel bad for them.

I am starting to feel delerious because of lack of food and manage to capture three or four black cats that I noticed appear around my trailer. I calmly capture them, knock them on the back of the head to kill them (like you would with a fish) and start skinning them like I would a fish. After skinning them and cooking the cats I eat my fill of meat and have enough to share with some other hungry people. In the back of my mind I am appalled at what I have done, but another part of my mind thinks that it was okay to kill and eat the cats because I was starving. I do not feel too upset though at what I have done but I remember wishing that things could have turned out differently.


The dream ends there.

#1) First dream takes place in some sort of aquarium museum place and I am there with my parents. Even though most of the displays are situated indoors, my parents and I are dressed in winter clothing. I cannot remember anything about the beginning of the dream but I thought the end was significant though I do not know why.

As my parents and I were leaving the aquarium we stepped outside into some sort of courtyard. There was a waist-deep, square-shaped pool in the center and it had four square styrofoam floating things in it. The styrofoam things wear painted to look like rocks and had a elaborate "V" design carved into the very tops. There was a fat old man wearing a bright yellow waterproof rain pants and a white A-shirt standing near the far edge of the pool. He had a long, narrow black stick in his hand and seemed to be looking for something underneath the water.

I approached the edge of the pool and saw a young seal hidding underneath one of the floating styrofoam rocks. The seal would surface for a moment and look around, then use its teeth to pull off guaze bandages from its body, before quickly swimming back underneath the styrofoam. My parents didn't seem to notice and kept walking. I tried to ask the old man about the seal but he ignored me and kept scouring the water for whatever he was looking for, which I assumed was the seal. I watched the young seal surface and pull of some more bandages before the dream ended and I woke up.


#2) The second dream takes place at Lake Whittaker, a trailer park where my parents go every weekend in the summer. The dream seems to take place a few years ago when my parent's trailer was situated at the top of the hill by the lake side. I remember stepping out of the trailer and looking to my right. There is garbage and debris spread across the neighbouring trailer's lot. People I don't recognize from waking like are standing around looking at the mess. Even though it appears to be summer, everyone is wearing winter clothes. I walk up to the nearest person and ask where the mess came from. He says "It was a bear."

I think that is odd because bears are not native to the area. I go back into my parent's trailer for something and even though I am only inside for a few seconds, when I go back outside, the mess on the neighbouring lot has been cleaned up and the people who had gathered are dispersing. There is a bit more I think, about trying to find someone who will help me find the alleged bear or something, but I cannot remember now.

The main character is me, but I do not look like me. I looked like a young boy with short blond hair, wearing a dirty grey jumpsuit and a bright orange scarf, and I was very thin. Every time I mention myself in this dream, picture the aforementioned description of the young boy.

No long before this dream I had to euthanize my first cat, Bambi, because she was very sick. I find it interesting that my memories of her, and the pain I feel from losing her, appear in the dream - but she does not actually appear herself. I also acknowledge my memories and feelings of her in the dream but it does not become lucid when I do so.

Picture of my cat, Bambi:


The dream took place in this beautiful, lush back-country that bordered the ocean with huge rocky cliffs. There was four areas to this place: a flat, grassy field that lead to the cliffs; a lightly forested area that was "hilly"; a farmhouse and country road on the otherside of the lightly forested area; and a heavier forested area that bordered the other three areas.


The dream starts off with me inside the farmhouse, tidying up rooms and packing my belongings because I was supposed to leave that place for good for some reason, though my heart was reluctant to go, because my memories awere in that farmhouse. It felt especially painful because my cat, Bambi, just died and I kept finding cat toys and other things that would bring up memories of her. There are other people there cleaning up as well, but I cannot remember specific descriptions about them. There was a middle-aged man, a young girl, and a young boy who was similar in age as I appeared in the dream.

Eventually I went for a walk because my heart ached for Bambi too much. I cannot remember now how in the dream I got there, but suddenly I was at the cliff overlooking the ocean. The cliff edge was very steep and must have been hundreds of meters above the sea level; it was one heck of a long way down. I cannot remember how or why now, but somehow I got too close to the edge and I slipped over. I grabbed a handful of grass that grew on the edge and it held me up (which totally wouldn't happen for real, but whatever). I screamed for help but I knew no one could hear me. I struggled for a bit and at first I was convinced that I was going to fall. I thought of letting go for a moment, because if I died then I would get to see my cat again, but somehow I found some sturdy handholds in the rock and pulled myself up onto the cliff top and to safety.

I laid there for a long while before gettting up and wandering along the cliff's edge (but far enough away so I wouldn't fall off again) and I came across some stray cats playing and lounging around near the cliff's edge. I pet them for a while and thought of my own cat before walking to the heavily forested area. On the way I kept running into stray cats and I wanted to believe that if I found out where they were coming from, I would find my cat Bambi, still alive. There were many strays that looked like her (gray, stripped tabby) but none that were her.

In the heavily forested area I came across a large hollow tree that many of the strays seemed to live in. I became worried about them because I was going to leave this place soon and there would be no one to take care of them. I wandered out of the forest and back to the farmhouse. I explained to the three DCs about the cats and they told me to stop worrying about it. Just then a large truck pulled up in front of the farmhouse and some construction workers got out. They worked incredibly fast and put up a chainlink fence around the farmhouse and the large hollow tree in the forest. I asked them what they were doing and they said the next people who were moving into the farmhouse were Veterinarians and wanted to make sure the stray cats were safe.

It was a great relief for me to know that the cats were going to be taken care of, and I hung around until all of the construction was done (including an extension on the farmhouse that was going to be a cat hospital), and this seemed to allow me to accept that my cat, Bambi, was gone and I could leave without regret or sadness.

Just at the end of the dream, as I was walking towards the car that would take me away from that place, I turned my head and saw a black bear by the edge of the heavily forested area. The middle aged man was there as well and he was ignoring the bear, which was ignoring him as well, and since I did not sense and danger I ignored the bear as well. The dream ended there.

April 30, 2003:
More bad dreams last night. I really hate the vibes in this apartment, and this time Abby wasn't there to make me feel better. I mean, when you wake up from a nightmare, the first thing you want to do is hug something soft, particularly something that purrs when you hug it. I don't really remember what they were, only that I woke up worried. I'm not sure what I was worried about in particular, because I can't really remember the dreams. Something about corrupt cops, but I don't know if that was the focus of the dream or just a minor detail.

June 5, 2003:
First, I had this dream with a lot of fighting. And mud. And blood. Lots and lots of blood. When I woke up, I nearly puked. Thank God the details are blurry now.

Then I had a dream about some dark, musty place... like a basement, or a dungeon, or something... there was a lot of broken boards and wood piled up in one corner... there may have been a tiny window, but I don't really remember. I was talking to some dark-haired guy... he had blue eyes. I think they were blue. They may have been green or lightish hazel. The lighting in there was too poor. I don't remember the conversation.

And then, I had this dream that I lived in a house out in the middle of nowhere, or something. I was talking to an older man for a little bit... there were some old ladies dressed up really nicely, I think there was a party or something? Then mom was out on the back porch, she had a very brightly colored parakeet... but our backyard flooded, and the parakeet fell into the water... I rescued it, and somehow revived it with CPR. Then suddenly, all of the water was gone, and the yard was dry, only there was a HUMONGOUS bear coming into the yard, we were afraid it would try and get into the house, and then the dream ended.

Then I started dozing off again, and as I was dozing off I dreamed that I was following 3 little cables, and when I found the source of one a voice said "Oh, dear..." and I woke up.

Morning of November 17, 1982. Wednesday. (Extensively clarified for inexperienced dream journalists on Sunday, 17 September 2017.)



It seems to be early afternoon throughout most of this dream. My dream starts out in the apartment above my sister Marilyn’s house on Loomis Street, which seems vacant at the time, though there are a few items around including minimal furniture. The steps are unusual, but are similar to other dreams with this distortion. They go around the sides of the living room to no particular location and have no railing.

Eventually, a large and seemingly menacing polar bear makes an appearance but does not chase me at any point. I realize that the polar bear may have eaten the previous occupant of the apartment, but later, I am also thinking that this tenant (Colleen) may have gotten away but left some of her things behind (due to the presence of the bear). There is a distortion when her apartment seems to be upside-down, yet without furniture and other items falling from the implied ceiling. There is a scene where I am on the unlikely stairs and looking down at the creature though I seem incorporeal at one point.

Later, in the last part of my dream, I am downstairs in my sister’s living room and there is a knock on the door which is presumed to be the mailman with a package. Instead, it turns out to be the polar bear. It is standing upright on two legs (and at least a foot taller than me). It does not attempt to attack me, though I wake almost immediately. There is a sense of surprise and awe, but it is not nightmarish.

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This dreams ends with non-lucid doorway waking symbolism. This type of dream outcome is sometimes triggered by the reticular activating system when environmental noise is present and based on the implied need to wake up and answer the door (which does not mean that the environmental noise is an actual door knock as the mind is unconscious and does not correctly perceive the real environment).

Dreams are experienced in real time and mainly symbolize mental processes and changes in REM semi-consciousness or neural patterns. Therefore, a staircase usually metaphorically signifies changes in levels of awareness while sleeping (just as it is deliberately used as such in some forms of meditation and hypnosis). In this case, using a staircase put me into a more vivid offset dream, which is typical. (I use a staircase in some dreams to augment lucidity.)

The polar bear becoming the preconscious to emergent consciousness factor in this case may be coincidentally based on the possible shift to doorway waking symbolism as a result of environmental noise, only if not assuming the earlier segment to be a precursor to it. The assumption that the door knock was possibly a mailman validates the reticular activating system prompt, as a mailman otherwise often relates to incrementing communication between dream self and conscious self (that is, the true conscious self identity trying to reach the otherwise muddled personified subconscious aka dream self).

If there is any waking life relevance here, it may relate to a wish to see myself as stronger or more adaptable to the cold weather (as I had moved from Florida to Wisconsin during the summer of 1978). However, there also seems to be a less-detailed thread of prescience. I told my sister about this dream. Later this day, she said “There’s your snow bear”. It was a television commercial we had never seen previously with the scene of a polar bear running across a featureless ice floe. (However, during one time period, I also regularly saw a real stuffed polar bear in a commercial window display while walking through an area in La Crosse.)

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Morning of August 17, 1980. Sunday. (Last clarified and resupplemented on Friday, 1 September 2017.)



The myth: “You cannot snore and dream at the same time.” This is one of those virtually endless bits of disinformation that one sees in various lists about dreams (and in most cases the entire list is untrue, including those related to “interpretation” by “experts”, as well as the superstitious “black cats crossing a person’s path“ mentality). I do not know who came up with this mindless concept or how it spread, but there have been many times in my life when I was snoring and dreaming at the same time, which includes the following entry.

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I am doing a news report that includes a celebrity interview (apparently with Rod Stewart, though he never makes an appearance), using a black generic microphone with a long cord (the cord going into the back of a white van), similar to the one I use in real life to record affirmations (though I am not using a cassette tape for any type of scripted dreaming in this case). At times, my microphone is making a sort of buzzing “snoring” sound. A few times, I move and swing the cord around to see if a short is causing the sound.

I walk around in the parking lot and it seems to be late morning. I am to ask the singer about the different classic cars he owned. The parking lot is full of his cars, mainly from the 1940s to the present. As I walk near one of the cars, I hear that it had been left running and the engine also makes a sort of unusual snoring sound. I consider asking him when I see him if he is aware that the car had been running. There are several others around at first, all unfamiliar males, but a few are from the radio station I am supposedly working for.

Eventually, a black bear comes onto the scene and my team and I need to escape. It also seems to be making a snoring sound, though it is implied to be growling as such.

I decide to quickly climb down over a cliff at the edge of the parking lot (to hide from the bear), and, although there is a narrow ledge, I end up hanging on the microphone cord. Someone, I do not know who, is soon pulling me up, though I sense it may be the bear doing this (though I am not sure), but as I begin to climb up, the bear leaps over the cliff with his front paws spread out but misses me and presumably falls to his death. I wake up in the middle of a snore.

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The parking lot setting, as well as the cliff, is completely unrelated to waking life. Both are specific liminal space indicators of the dream state, the parking lot because it represents a halfway point (between dreaming and waking) as analogous to leaving an area (the dream state) and the potential of returning home (waking life), and the cliff being related to the biologically premonitory nature of waking from sleep (which often produces a natural falling sensation based on inner ear dynamics and coming out of being unconscious and otherwise has no meaning).

The bear in this case may also have no meaning other than the preconscious factor (which is sometimes aggressive, depending on incidental dream dynamics, for the sole purpose of waking the dreamer) as it was primarily rendered by way of the sound of my own snoring. Note the progression; microphone buzzing, car engine running, bear growling. This is all sound-based, where my unconscious was simply trying to compensate for the sound of my own snoring yet also slowly alerting me to the waking transition. To validate this, a microphone would not normally get my attention (especially as I am already holding it despite its presumed technical difficulty), a car engine running would not necessarily get my attention either, but a bear certainly would. See how this works? (It should be obvious to a person of reasonable intelligence.) The usual hypnopompic falling dynamic was transferred to the bear so that my waking was softer than it would have been otherwise.

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Morning of October 6, 1979. Saturday.

Dream #: 4,674-04. Optimized 1 minute 30 second read.





My dream implies I am in an ongoing monster movie called “In a Nutshell” in Cubitis. Although it is vivid, my emotions are not intense enough to initiate wakefulness as I summon the essence of horror to serve my dream’s imaginary narrative. (I often do this by habit to manifest ASMR, the “spine tingling” that brings about bliss, but which is rarely complete in this mode of dreaming.)

My father is near at one point, sitting on the bed, but only as a backstory commentator.

Most scenes occur in semi-darkness in the southwest bedroom of the Cubitis house (not where I am sleeping in reality but still the result of background awareness I am in bed).

The featured monster begins its life by growing inside an egg that mimics a walnut. I see one of them prematurely hatch as a tiny black horse that jerks about on its side on the floor - reminiscent of a mosquito larva (“wriggler”). This one may be dying because of hatching too quickly (though I hit the “walnut” with a hammer as a requirement of the “movie’s script”). (There is no outcome here, only a transition to another scene.)

The adult form of the monster is a mutant bear that has poisonous porcupine quills. It hunts people for food. There is a nighttime scene when I am “surprised” by the creature (though it is metacognitive summoning and pretending). It occurs as I walk around a corner of the Cubitis house (at its south end). The monster lifts its arms, but it does not attack me.

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Metacognitive Dreaming Responses:

Predominant bedroom setting.

REM atonia (something enclosed or its movement restricted; the tiny “horse” inside the “walnut”).

Sleep myoclonus (the wriggling “horse” on its side, modeling my sleeping position, as a horse typically appears when anticipating my physical mobility after waking).

Association with “hibernation” or sleeping (the mutant bear).

“Around the corner” metacognitive summoning (a deliberate dreaming element since early childhood). In a childhood dream, the result was a dog coming from around the same corner. It jumped up to press against my chest, resulting in a myoclonic awakening.

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Influences:

The movie “Prophecy” (1979).

The movie “The Valley of Gwangi” (1969).

The Crazy Magazine parody of “The Waltons” titled “The Walnuts” (1974).

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Night of December 10, 1967. Sunday.



This is another early childhood dream that I had recorded years ago that came again to me around the same time last night as the Christmas-themed “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”. Again, I am not sure why, perhaps because of my desire to work with any and all previously documented dreams and resolve any mysteries.

In this fairly vivid dream (not lucid), even though I am a child, I seem to have some sort of adult role with regard to being a manager or making decisions relative to a brewery I inherited. Neither of my parents drank beer but we did live near G. Heileman Brewing Company at one point (which apparently stopped operating in 1996, about two years after I moved to Australia). The location, though, seems to be near the Chipmunk Coulee region and near a mostly wooded, elevated area. It is a fictional, or at least unfamiliar, area. Added note: I consider this dream long-term precognitive at a subtle layer, as I did work there in real life years later, though only as a cleaner.

For the most part, I remain outside across a bridge (made of logs laid horizontally) from the actual brewery. There is a moat-like area around the building, but not filled with water; just mostly ice and snow and parts of bushes, sticks, and logs. There are not many people around outside - I guess they are mostly working.

In the last part of my dream, there is supposedly a bear running around inside the brewery and causing problems, perhaps even eating people. I am not sure how to deal with that - though I guess it is my job to get rid of the bear somehow. I go closer near the beginning of the bridge that leads across the moat-like area but never cross the bridge or go inside the building to see what is going on. It is not really a nightmare, though, as I never see the bear. There are vague “The Prisoner” references (which I must have seen just prior to this dream, as there are also hammer and anvil references regarding how the beer is supposedly made, but not realistically feasible - according to IMDb, it was broadcast on December 10th, 1967).

There is a vague idea that the bear may be a pet that escaped from its owner, but that is not all that clear an idea. Not much drama ensues. I mostly just want to leave the region and find myself wandering around in the woods hoping the bear does not leave the building. There is a bit of relief in the thought that it would have to know how to open doors - but even so - how had it gotten in in the first place? Thus, I actually feel safer outside in the wild, as the bear is in the building (the opposite of other dreams with similar themes, especially with cougars and bulls).

Morning of December 17, 1972. Sunday.



A bear is wandering around in the area near our home in Cubitis. There are no clearer thoughts of my parents or addressing my concerns to them about the bear, as if I do not perceive them as being present (though this is not logical - though many of my childhood dreams were erroneously rendered as such, which may be a natural but vestigial dreaming element, as my parents never left me home alone in reality). I worry about it getting into our house (though this dream has no nightmarish element, only lesser trepidation). At times, it seems of a duller orange coloration, though I think it is a lighter brown (or meant to be) in most scenes. There is a concern which seems to last about a full day and night and there is what seems like at least one “reset”. Throughout this seeming passage of time, I am not aware of any other activities or events.

Finally, the bear finds her three cubs in our backyard (an event which seems to be taking place early in the morning) and the mood of my dream changes completely into a beautiful sense of peace and love as the bear then seems to radiate a sort of light or light rays like the sun (even though it logically seems as if she would have found them before unless they had recently just strayed into that area coming into the backyard from elsewhere). Two of the bear cubs are in the area between our house and our neighbors’ to the south. The third is closer to his mother on her right side.

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This dream combines two forms of waking symbolism, sunrise waking symbolism and coalescence waking symbolism.

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This dream is a wonderful example of rendering two contrasting ideas in the same scene. The mother bear of course represents my mother (especially as it is this dream’s preconscious factor). The cub directly to her right (in the foreground in my viewpoint of the scene) represents me. Farther to the right in this scene, another cub (in the pair of cubs closer to the neighbors’ yard) is also me, but with the third cub representing Lisa. The two of “us” in this pair farther from the mother bear relates to a real day-to-day activity, though the mother bear is still watching them. (This is really not that different from seeing two versions of someone in a dream, or in fact, seeing oneself in a dream as if invisible or incorporeal or seeing two or more versions of the same pet at the same time.) The bear also remains, in the final scene, in the area where my mother hung clothes in real life.

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“Seeing” my mother as a threatening figure from the viewpoint of my dream self (prior to resolving the association in the last act) is really not that unusual. However, there were a number of dreams where the animal symbolism was not resolved as such and seemed limited to biological factors, that is, being “warned” about a potential animal-related event as a biological safety mechanism rather than having an “interpretation”. (I am fairly certain that if a dog dreams about being pursued or attacked by a large animal that the meaning is literal and preparatory, not symbolic.)

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There was a precognitive thread in this dream as well. About a day after this dream, I had gotten, from my older sister Carol, a package containing a number of plastic model kits. One of them was “Black Bear and Cubs”. There were two cubs in the kit, and the bear was not golden, but the associations where very similar.

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