Bear Medicine / Bare Medicine

(Friday, November 7, 2014) Full moon in Taurus / Maiden of blades

I am in a spaceship, suspended over the earth with The Dreamsters Union.

The scene shifts. Either we are beamed down to the planet or our ship lands on a tall peak, because suddenly we are hiking down a steep and wooded mountain trail, in snow nearly up to our knees. Snow is falling hard enough to dampen both light and sound.

I carry a long, pointed stick in my right hand, maybe for balance. Everyone is walking behind me, except for Pat. He is a few hundred feet ahead of me. He has reached the base of the mountain and is moving left into a snowy meadow. I glance to my right and am terrified to see a huge black bear rushing toward us both.

The bear stops briefly. He seems to be deciding whether to attack Pat or to attack me. I raise my pointed stick in a lame effort at self-defense. The bear roars and lunges toward Pat, taking him down onto his back. He rips open Pat’s stomach with his teeth and claws. Pat’s abdomen looks like a huge black bowl, a gaping and horrifying wound that seems fatal to me.

The scene shifts again. The Dreamsters are all sleeping together, near a stone fireplace like the one at Jeanne’s cabin. The logs in the hearth have burned down to warm, orange embers. Our individual mattresses are strewn upon the floor. My “sister” sleeps near Peter. I see a small black frog creep near her face as she sleeps, then hop off of her pillow onto the floor. I ask one of the Dreamsters, maybe Peter, about Pat. I am overjoyed to hear that Pat has been able to heal himself completely.

The dream shifts again. I have walked out of the Dreamsters’ space into a meeting room at my office. My boss, Louis, is there as well as many other of my coworkers. I turn away from Louis and realize that I am naked. I walk calmly back into the dreaming room, unruffled. Once inside the chamber I notice that I am wearing my red flannel nightgown, so I understand that I am not naked at all but that Louis is able to see the real me.

Day notes:

I have just finished two retreats in the same week, one with the Dreamsters at Jeanne’s cabin, and one at work. Our team-building meeting at work used the “Strengthsfinders” book to learn more about each other. Louis and I ended up in the same breakout session because of our similar “strengths.” We share a characteristic called “connectedness” which is about perception of the underlying threads (nothing is an accident, belief in the Collective Unconscious). I joked with him that we are the mystics on the team. I saw a glimmer of recognition in his eye.

I love that the name The Dreamsters Union is inspired by The Teamsters Union. Union members are coworkers. Dreamsters are coworkers. United by dreams.

The work we are doing as a dream group is at a very high level. Spaceship, mountaintop. White snow.

Bear (from “Medicine Cards” by Jamie Sams and David Carson) has much to say about this dream but I could not find a link to the copyrighted text on the web. Suffice it to say that Bear spends winter, the time of the Ice Queen’s reign, in the Dream Lodge, the place where the ancestors sit in Council. Why was this dangerous bear awake and outside of his Dream Lodge?

The dream seems a good omen about the completeness of Pat’s recovery from stomach cancer. I wonder about the black frog. Frog symbolizes cleansing. Maybe my “sister” is Bonnie, since she is so often in my dreams. Or maybe Claudia, since we were both described as cats in Jeanne’s workshop (panther and lynx). A mystery.

The sensation of the six (or seven?) of us in the spaceship was very real. And soft and dreamlike at the same time. Like being held in a silver cloud.