Cat & 2 Dead Mice

DREAM about touching a dead mouse accidentally, because I was trying to reposition food I saw for a cat so that she’ll be sure to see it. I was doing it habitually on the run, in a rush to go somewhere…

DREAMWORK:

I felt disgusted when I realized what I had touched, kept looking at my hand not knowing what to do with it. There were 2 little dead bodies when I looked back, but I swore I didn’t see any before… Mice, are a personification of my deepest fear, my phobia extremis. It’s a sticky, messy ball of irrational terror wrapped around raw vulnerability and powerlessness. I’ve been around to this groove on my healing spiral a few times already, and here I am again.

Well, at least the mice are dead now. They do not have the kind of paralyzing effect on me they used to have. But the memory of the wrenching repulsion is still with me. They don’t set me off into the farthest orbits of sanity anymore, but the aversion is still vivid and visceral. This all takes place in the area of my abdomen, solar plexus down. It’s as if I’ve been entrained into a Pavlovian response to become immobilized by the shock of suddenly finding myself in a trap.

How to break this entrainment, neutralize the charge of this memory? I’ll look for the answer in the dream… The cat from the dream was Moxie, one of my sister’s brood who went to kitty heaven recently due to old age. She was spunky, wiry, highstrung, and a loner. She was very vocal and demanded attention with full-body urgency whenever she was in need, which wasn’t easy to satisfy in an uneasy tribe of 9 cats. As cats go I admired her for her individuality and her assertions of it, even though she wasn’t recognizably sweet or charming. She insisted on her ways, and lived by her own strategy in the constant turf war that was her communal life.

I suppose I identify with her, her personality and her power, particularly on the level of sheer animal survival. She wasn’t at the top or the bottom of the pecking order, she was an outsider that came and went as she willed. It’s what I would like to be, given who and what I am. To ‘belong’ to a tribe, yet still have the freedom to come and go, leave and stay as I feel called to. To always have a home and hearth and temple to return to, fall back on, accepted unconditionally by, to love and commit to in my own way.

I wanted to make sure she has food (in the dream it was something red—passion? liveliness? Creativity?), but I was going at such high speed I barely managed to grab it and put it in the ‘right’ place. The dead mice (there were 2 in the dream, though i only touched one) slowed me down though, made me stop dead in my tracks (literally!) and look back. Unfinished business needing attention. Standing firm in my true self and finding my own roar like Mox, while grounding my roots and home base in my own ‘tribe’ will help me break the spell of this traumatic memory. Well, I haven’t found my tribe yet, not as I can recognize as such, but in the meantime, I can do the ground work, in all the ways it means.

Stay true and rooted in the Self, then nothing can defile or diminish who you really are, because You are rooted in One and All.

This dream is probably in response to the irritating and disturbing feeling of being unmoored I’ve woken up with in the last few days. We may be called to let go of the shores, but we are still emphatically attached and held by the sometimes invisible web of life, in which loneliness and powerlessness are nothing but hallucinations of the mind drunk on fear. Sober up.