Primal Fear

Usually I don't remember my dreams very much, maybe bits and pieces, but today was an amazingly vivid dream. Even when I do dream "vividly" I don't tend to really care much about them or even think about them all that much, today was different.

This was the last dream in a sequence, I'm not too sure what the previous ones were, you know how dreams are they flow and mesh and change rapidly. So in this particular dream I was out with my old best friend Richard and some other person I don't quite remember even now. We were on the road leading to my grandmas house in Las Vegas, New Mexico--this road is super hilly and very curvy-- and we were riding bikes and just talking. For some reason we spot a snow leopard attacking a big creature of some sort, it was either a cow or maybe a buffalo, across the barbed wire fence. Then a pair of cheetahs show up, and a couple lions (one was a juvenile male with a short mane, the other two were full grown female lionesses) and they all join in the action. For some reason Donita--Richards mother--shows up and is with a friend sitting right by the fence in gaudy pink lawn chairs watching all this.

Something else happens, I'm afraid I don't remember exactly what, but a group of people on a safari, hunters I'm guessing drives by in one of those safari jeeps and gets attacked. They drop a shot gun and a rifle and rush to town I think after being attacked. So then Richard, myself, and the other guy see the snow leopard and one of the cheetahs coming under the fence near us, but before we can do anything they trot over to where Donita and the other woman are. Donita is true to her personality in my dream, that being loud, obnoxious, angry, and super drunk, and starts screaming at the leopard to get away kicking the fence and her friend goes so far as to swing one of the chairs at it. Badddd move, the cheetah and the leopard both attack and shit.. It was scary. Every one has seen those discovery or animal planet shows where the big cats attack, it's vicarious! It's just tearing this woman apart and finally the three of us run over and start shooting trying to scare off the beasts, at this point they kinda run back but not too far and circle around. Richard is blubbering like a baby--his mom booked it the opposite way-- and me with the shotgun climb under the fence and drag this lady back to the road, while the third person is shooting and yelling keeping all the cats away. I accomplish this and lay the person over the basket attached to the front of my bike, I know weird right? And take off.

This is where it becomes even more weird. The lions and the other cats chase me parallel to the road roaring and calling, which is scary enough as it is, but then one of the cheetahs gets on Richards bike and comes after me on the road. I'm going as fast as I can up and down these hills and I guess in my dream cheetahs can go just as fast on a bike as they could running so I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Next thing I know I'm going as fast as I can toward the side of the road where there's a little ramp like ditch and launch myself over the fence and land still riding. And I do it two more times but on the last time I land wrong, on the side with the lions and leopards, and then I wake up in a cold sweat.

I honestly woke up with my whole body sore from being tense, my back and legs soaked with sweat, and my heart beating fast. I'm a horrible, horrible story teller so it probably doesn't seem too scary to anyone who reads this, but it was. After I had looked around and calmed down a bit I came to the realization that humans are weak weak creatures. If any of the carnivores in our world become self aware, we're screwed! Sure we're on top of the food chain now, but it's not because we're particularly strong, heck a two year old chimp can break us, nor are we particularly well adapted to our world. I mean we are, but hell if power went out half the human population would die from cold, hunger, all sorts of things these 'lesser creatures' fight off every day. Nor do we have any sort of defense or offensive skills, if a man doesn't have a gun or even a pointy stick, that bear or cat is gonna kill him. We don't have claws, or teeth suited to attack or even defend ourselves.. it's a scary thought. On the flip side, though, we have brains. That's about all we have actually, sure we now have our technology and our guns, but without the brain we'd be screwed. I guarantee that homo-sapians would have become extinct if we hadn't developed so quickly, but we all still have that deep down fear. I call it a primal fear, but I'm sure there's new and better terms for it now, but every one of us, I believe, has these ingrained very human fears. Falling, the dark, predators, probably many many more, but from time to time they show themselves in a dream or a hallucination and we realize just how worthless we are and how lucky we are.

It's interesting to look at these primal fears from a psychological point of view. First, though, I think it's worth pointing out just how much of an affect these fears have on us especially technologically. Take, for example, the human fear of the dark. The first thing that cavemen accomplished was how to control fire, thus banishing the darkest places. Perhaps this isn't so much a fear of the dark, but a fear of the unknown. Even now, with all the light we can handle, we're still afraid. Maybe this fear of the unknown can be combined with that of our fear of predators and again reduced, except this time to a much simpler fear of death. After all why do we fear beasts or even the dark? Dying is the ultimate unknown, and as such we're afraid of it, a cheetah or lion charging at you roaring and growling is terrifying perhaps not only for the pain, but the ultimate ending of death. I think that there is a degree of fear of death in all of us, but when you approach an individual I think you have to look at other factors.

Since this is my dream, trying to understand it I need to look at other things that may cause this terror in me. Even though I believe everyone is afraid of death, I think it might be lesser in some people, or maybe not even lesser, but just transferred away from death and onto another fear. For me, I'm not particularly afraid of dying, in fact I'm rather excited and curious about the whole ordeal. What's next? What exactly happens when you die? Is there a life beyond? Can you hang out here on earth or is there just oblivion? Before you go calling the cops I'm not suicidal, I realize how young I am and how much there is out there left to experience no matter how intriguing the idea of death is. So then why exactly was I so afraid? Looking at the contents of my dream maybe I can find an answer. The inclusion of Donita and Richard, both of whom I haven't seen in years now, says a lot. It was with them that I first broke my arm, which was terribly, terribly, traumatic for me. I never really considered it actually, but I think after I broke my arm I transferred my fear of death to the more specific fear of pain. In fact after my arm healed I stopped doing many things I once loved to do. Skating, climbing trees, and I even began limiting new experiences for fear of getting hurt. Sure my fracture wasn't terribly bad, I'm completely healed after all, but it was enough that I still hesitate, and even refuse to do certain things because of it. When I broke my arm that first time I was running in the middle of the street with Richard and fell--yeah it was really that simple I tripped over my own god damn legs--and landed on my left arm to a sickening CRACK. There wasn't any blood, but my arm was snapped down at like a 90 degree angle and hurt like all hell! He dragged me outta the street, screaming and crying and we both went the short distance back to his house where his mom piled us in the car--me still crying--and drove like a mad woman to the ER. Though I don't quite remember in detail the ER part because of the drugs they pumped into me, but I do know they set my arm and from eye witness testimony (haha I couldn't resist) that I screamed and thrashed around because of the pain. Maybe I projected this pain onto the image of Richard and Donita and now, almost ten years later, they reappear in my dream with the idea of getting torn open by wild animals thus causing the terror in my dream. I did see Donitas friend get torn apart and she didn't die so maybe it was the very idea of that amount of pain that scared me? The fact that the terror set in when I was on the road could also point to fact that I first broke my arm in the middle of the road.

I'm no psychiatrist so I'm probably missing a lot. I really don't know what the significance of my location was, nor the role of the other people aside from Donita and Richard, but it certainly seems like a reasonable explanation to me. I also think it's rather interesting that the beasts that showed up in my dream weren't things that I actually am afraid of. Big cats are actually my favorite wild animals out there, I'm much more afraid of wolves and bears for example than I am of a cheetah or a leopard. Actually the cheetah is my favorite animal followed closely by the snow leopard, both of which were in my dream. I'm not sure why I wrote this all up, but I will say that after writing up the dream and then "analyzing" it, the fear seems less intense and less troublesome. Maybe my subconscious wanted to give me a reminder for some reason, or it was particularly active and unable to be repressed.

Gah I sound like a dumb Psychoanalyst, then again what I just did was exactly that. I analyzed a dream I had, found a childhood root, and "confronted" it. I just read a book called The Denial of Death so maybe that whole schpeel is probably part of that, I mean the idea is really, really interesting to me and I'd like to look into this sort of thing more. Maybe now that I'm learning more about psychology and more about the world I can come up with some original ideas or even theorize in a less juvenile way. Any thoughts or comments or anything feel free.