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Animal Dreams

by Carolyn Tipton, 2019

Sleeping spaniel, what are you dreaming of? Everyone
says squirrels, but maybe
it's a different realm entirely, lilac-
suffused: I've seen the purple
of your gaze when I've just waked you.

At least you don't dream of standing
before your class without your clothes on,
of losing your luggage in a railway station--
the self's banal anxieties about its presentation to the world.

Let's say you dream into being
some of the texture of this world; let's say
we need your dreams. Let's say the liquid
sound we love--cottonwood leaves in the wind--
is linked to some parched bird dreaming of water.

Why have we rid the world of fairies,
dryads, naiads, brownies, elves? Milton
says Christ's crying in his infancy
drove the deities & demi-deities away.
And now we're driving out sea-turtles, monarch butterflies,
species of pines & lilies, wolves & foxes, diving birds.
The world will be less rich without their presence--but what about
their dreams? What if they've all been partly dreaming
us, and lacking them, our world becomes
as trivial and narrow as our dreams?

Source: Carolyn Tipton's The Poet of Poet Laval (2019), p.67. Used by permission.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Carolyn may mean this metaphorically, but as a longtime dreamworker I suspect it's literally true. Physics went profoundly wrong a century ago when Schroedinger proposed locking that poor cat in a box, insisting the cat must be both dead and alive, in a superimposed state, since no observer could see. In his anthropocentric arrogance he overlooked the obvious observer present: the cat. I rather think the cat knows.


LISTS AND LINKS: shamanism - animals and animal people - extinction - dreamwork and dreaming's purpose(s) - our obligation to creatures we've endangered - poems - a dream in which small creatures uphold the universe: What You Imagine Happens

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