The dreaming mind is very odd. I've always been curious about how dreams arise, and from where, and have often searched my memory for clues and associations from waking life. This one had quite a few.
The morning before the dream, I was talking to a friend in the community garden who has grown a huge spiky plant with brilliant blue flowers. It wasn't exactly a thistle, but reminded me of a much smaller native planted called viper's bugloss. I asked him what it was and he handed me the planting tag: "Great Wyoming Bugloss." Where did viper's bugloss grow? At the Boat Lot.
The evening before the dream, I had a FaceBook exchange with my cousin, who was often with me at the lake when we were kids, and who lives there now. We were speaking of our mothers, who were sisters: this week marked the anniversary of my aunt's death.
I'm going to the lake next week.
And just before I went to sleep, I was reading The Saga of the People of Laxandall, from the Icelandic sagas. I don't remember any mention of sturgeons, but certainly of fishing, and of shape-shifting. One of Haldor Laxness's modern novels of Iceland is actually about a woman who changed herself into a fish, long hidden Under the Glacier.
So the dream didn't arise from nothing, but who knows how these ideas and memories managed to combine themselves into one of "those dreams" that seem to be telling me something? I wish I knew! But I do believethat we all have within us ancient wisdom, whether it's hidden under the glacier, under the water, or just under the many layers of our busy waking lives.
Sturgeon: the most endangered group of genera known, they've been around for 200 million years, some grow to 18 feet in length. That's quite a picture you posted, nose in the net...beautiful and sad.
Posted by: mike | June 23, 2012 at 01:17 PM