Dreaming of Bears

I enjoy it when my dreams contain animals. The most powerful ones involve bears, Black, Grizzly, Polar. I'm usually in a generic wooded area and notice the bears walking through the woods a distance from me. Sometimes one's heading right for me, and my reaction is usually to panic.

In the mid nineties I took a trip to Churchill, Manibota, partly by car and partly by train (because the road ends), seeking out polar bears on the shores of Hudson's Bay. We bought tickets for a ride on the tundra buggy, and spent a whole day out on the tundra in the big bus sitting atop huge wheels (to protect us from the bears), but saw not one. It was still beautiful, though, and hardly a waste of time.

The next day we heard that a few bears had been messing around in the city dump and that one was now in the bear jail in town, to be helicoptored out soon enough to a remote spot. I wondered how it would know to make its way back to its family, or whether it was a loner and this didn't matter.

Last night I dreamt, along with a polar bear approaching me in the woods, of stairs. Shaky, awkward stairs in a stairwell that led from and to what, I don't recall. Usually in my dreams of stairs I succumb to the terribly scary task of climbing them even though there are no railings, or I have to jump far over gaps, with the risk of falling down into a black abyss. Last night, for the first time, I decided in my dream not to climb the stairs. This has never happened before. When I woke I took this as a good sign, that I've decided to follow my own path, one less risky perhaps, but clearly my own.

Dreams prepare us for the risks and failures of everyday. They let us work through our actions without the reality of falling or failing. They lead us to forge our own path, where stairs can be avoided or climbed, bears observed from a distance or confronted. The trick is to remember the dream once awake.