I was looking for something else when I found a book called Dream Animals by James Hillman. This was a gift of long ago that I found so beautiful I saved it in a special place, and then forgot it was there. I think our relationship with animals is like this. I see an owl beside the pond in the early evening; a wolf howls on the ridge beyond the road and my senses become hyper-alert. For a moment I am really awake. And then my instincts go back to sleep and I forget that I am able to be this alive all the time.
Dream animals also bring us into contact with our deep nature. The horse that was running away with me in last night’s dream, on closer notice, is a draft horse trailing the lines of traces and harness. So while a dream dictionary may interpret this image as my passion about something running away with me, if I am alert to the detail, the dream horse is really showing me I have broken free from something binding or limiting.
I sometimes use the Journey Oracle cards to interpret dreams. The images on the double-sided cards are like dream animals that flicker in and out of my awareness. Just like the moment of extreme attention caused by the wolf howl or the runaway dream horse, parts of my shamanic paintings on the oracle cards catch in the net of my heightened awareness, and make metaphoric connections between parts of a dream, and my ordinary reality understanding of its message.
