A Parade of Dream Animals: I Remember.

​12/15/22. I began remembering and recording my dreams in 2008. Dream animals visited occasionally at he beginning, but when I left veterinary medicine in in 2017, and less animals graced my waking life, they poured into my dreams.

As a practice of gratitude for the ones that came to visit, tonight, I remember: dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, goats, a ferret, an ermine, mouse, hamsters, gerbils, squirrels, ants, flies, bees, and ticks; a tiny spider hanging from my hand on a thin silver thread; hugging a tiger with claws that curled upward like a jester’s shoes;

a bald eagle laying in the grass soaked by a sprinkler; fat and fluffy African wild dogs; a rhinoceros stampeding in circles, hippopotamuses by a river; a leopard passed around a campfire; an elephant in the house asking, "Do you want pizza?"

I met dream animals I'ver never seen anywhere else: a crosti – a flying squirrel with a quail’s curled feather on its head—; a crab/spider with feathers, a unicorn crossed with a woolly mammoth; a man taking care of a blue dog underground.

I remember a baby buffalo with an arrow in its side; a swimming pool full of Siberian tigers; a lizard that turns into a turtle, gorillas in a zoo; bears, snakes, pods of orca, penguins, an enclosure full of ostriches, a pelican, a raven, hawks, a pheasant shot with an arrow; a seal chasing a ball underwater. I remember salmon climbing out of the river and walking across a sand bar;

opening a door in a casino and discovering a circle of chickens dressed in colorful feather costumes and waiting for a ceremony to begin; owls flying through the forest with moon snails on their wings; an osprey and I flying over a train while staring at each other; studying bats and finding a sick one on the ground; a beautiful black and yellow oriole in a birch tree.

I remember three ducks flying west, a solitary swan sitting on a pond; glass dolphins and cranes; a tornado of giraffe around one tall tree; a male lion shot by a ranger; a zebra walking onto a plain bathed in moonlight; a man carrying a kangaroo up the stairs; vervet monkeys squabbling on the roof. There was once a donkey on the rim of the grand canyon wearing a sombrero; a crocodile chasing me. I remember stepping on turtles I mistook for stones in the river, and passing hundreds of frogs buried in mud up to their eyeballs.

I rememberI swallowing a fly, a moth, and a caterpillar on a string; a small white kitten biting my left big toe; a man freeing an entangled humpback whale mother and calf.

There was a night when I carried a wooden bowl full of white worms to an orchard, and another when I listened to wolves howl I found two coyotes in a tree with a calf and I constructed a coyote drop between two houses.

I remember a sea turtle swimming away from a gigantic prehistoric fish and a porpoise family jumping into my boat; a man who becomes a raven who becomes a coyote who becomes two greyhounds. I also remember the injured ones: smashed heads, broken bones. gunshot wounds, abscesses, liver shunts, cancer, sarcoids, and leprosy. I remember spending hours in surgery, administering blood transfusions, examining radiographs, and cleaning wounds. Someone passed me a bowl full of cat paws; I witnessed burned African animals, including Wildebeest, on the velt; and watched an injured orca lifted out of the ocean by a helicopter.

Having them all together like this, their number and variety stun me. So many animals! Oh, my compassion for the injured and afraid ones, and my gratitude for their visits.