A Dream About Birds

Last night I dreamt about birds.

And here's the thing about me and dreaming, I have a beautiful mind for dreams.  My brain is a maze of symbology, experience, memories and power.  So when my subconscious takes over as production manner of sleep, wild things happen.

I dreamt of being in a house that was, intuitively, mine.  Two rooms made an impression, made the cut as the stage.  And as is so common with dreams the place was simultaneously perfectly familiar and perfectly foreign to me.  The front room, what may have been a living or sitting room, was bright with sun and components of an old house-sitting job I used to do in Baton Rouge.  Mellow fabrics, dark wood and yes, so bright with sun.  The kitchen was similarly lit but was the kitchen of my childhood home in Westfield, New Jersey- updated a little, removed from the Victorian house I grew up in, and magically transported to a house in my head.

For the most part, my life has been spent in the American East.  Most of that time has been in the American South.  Dozens of seasons in North Carolina and Louisiana; months here or there in Maryland.  I know the way the world feels in the South.  I know what the air tastes like in the winter, and the slanting processions of shadows in the fall.  I know summer heat.  And I know the light in the spring.  Light in the South, in the spring, is soft; the sun has not yet taken on the edge it does in the summer.  It is butter-colored and warm in the best way, elementally airy and sweet.

That light lit the stage of the rooms, the chambers of my mind.

And when you are alone in your home in the South and the sun feels like that, you open the windows and listen to the world (which is hopefully quiet and calm).  Which is exactly what my dream-self did.

Which is when I was visited by three birds- harbingers, I am sure, of something.  But I cannot yet tell you what.

Moving in the liquid atmosphere that is as close to a constant as I can imagine in dreams, I opened the front window, a window that dream-Kate apparently kept without a screen.  For a heartbeat the peace was palpable and then the wind was brought into the house by a hawk who swooped past me and screamed in to the kitchen where it made an unholy racket.  I had the same reaction to the dream-hawk as I did to the (second) real-bat in my tiny apartment in Vermont.  Lock the dog in the other room, open the door, hit the floor and pray.  The panicked not-time of dreams seemed both ever-lasting and instantaneous.  As soon as the hawk appeared he seemed to disappear back out of the window through which he came.

Then I did something that real-Kate would never do.  I thought to close the window, just in case there was a repeat performance in mine and the hawk's future.  But no.  Not hawks this time.  Next through the still-open window was a troupe of hummingbirds.  Yes, at least ten soft-green and gently gold hummingbirds launched themselves into that first room of the house.  They followed me in a swarm when I tried to run, to be rid of them.  Having ten dream-hummingbirds flying around your head is not necessarily as pleasant as it seems.

But worse still is having one dream-magpie launch itself through the still open window.  Utterly defeated by this latest bird in the aviary army, I laid on the floor and curled into a tiny ball, as small as I could make myself, desperate to protect myself.  And yet the magpie persisted.  It writhed between the shield I tried to make with my arms and proceeded to peck below my left eye, slowly moving toward the actual thing.

Right before it pecked my eye out, my Mom swooped in (pardon the pun), to startle the creature, and send it flitting away.   Right after, I woke up- both eyes intact but unsettled by this dream.  Are the birds, like Scrooge's three ghosts, visitors with unsavory intent?  Or are the birds just birds?

Are the birds ever just birds?

Until next time, regardless of what dreams may come…