I have not posted in some time. We have been traveling and I focus on my travel blog when I take a trip. I welcome people to read the stories from my trips, but I write about the places we go partly to have a record I can review. Photos without information lose their meaning.
I suppose there are people who focus a blog on their dreams. I remember very few of my dreams and the following may be the first and only dream I ever record for public consideration. I don’t understand exactly where dreams come from. I say this even with a background in cognitive psychology. There are elements of memories dredged up from who knows where and then there is a creative element that seems close to random. No wonder Freud and others thought there must be some useful rationale for the dreams his patients had.
I just returned from a trip as I mentioned above and was likely sleep-deprived which may explain some of the unusualness of this experience.
In my dream, I was a volunteer acting as a trainer in a “Women in the outdoors” program. The idea of such programs is to encourage women to explore outdoor experiences long the interest of men – e.g., camping, fishing, hunting. For some reason unrelated to my own life experiences, I was involved in encouraging hunting experiences. Perhaps my lack of experience has something to do with the creative aspect of the dream.
The first idea for this group was to prepare those interested to hunt upload birds. Provide basic shotgun skills and safety training (e.g., how to cross a fence). Then, the group would visit a pheasant game farm and have a guided experience hunting pheasants.
Things made sense to this point, but then the dream went completely off the rails. Visiting a game farm was too expensive for the group and so a decision was made to shoot chickens. If that were not strange enough and because the group was being hosted by a local church, the idea of releasing several chickens in the church basement and then searching for and shooting these birds seemed a possible solution to the money problem. This is what I mean by creativity. No one could possibly ever have had this thought before.
The birds were secured and released at the next meeting, but before any hunting could take place the pastor who had given us permission to use the facility got wind of the plan and drove to the church. Realizing we were in trouble we did our best to round up the chickens and secreted the birds, the women, and the guns out the back door.
That was the dream and I woke up and sent myself an email with the rough structure of the dream because I did not want to forget the strangeness of the experience. Any now you too, must trouble yourself trying to understand how such thoughts can emerge from a human mind.
No actual chickens were harmed in experiencing this dream