On My Dream about Beavers and…Diana Ross

With the notable exception of Joseph from the Old Testament, I have never enjoyed reading accounts of characters’ dreams in fiction. I always skip over them. I can’t be certain, but I think it was the novelist Walker Percy who said something to the effect: “You know how typically boring it is when someone tries telling you their dream in person. Reading it in fiction is even more boring.” I agree.

Dream sequences in television shows and movies are the same for me. They always seem like filler material or pretentious attempts at artistry.

In nonfiction writing, histories, memoirs, biographies, reportage and such stuff, I do derive value in reading about the dreams of the people being written about. Who wouldn’t want to learn what President Abraham Lincoln dreamed about on the eve of the Civil War as opposed to the dream of an invented serial killer as he considers his next victim?

In my own writing, I think I’ve mentioned my dreams once or twice, most prominently in the rain book. Ever since Sonny the husky died last June, she has revisited me in a series of fantastic dreams where she was always young and running wild. I have attempted interpreting them and met with some success, I think.

Two nights ago, I had the strangest, most vivid, wholly unprecedented dream of my life. It was so intense and bizarre that I woke up after its conclusion, arose from the bed, found a notebook and pen, and wrote down as many images as I could recall. I haven’t done that sort of thing in 10-15 years. Because I am living through such extraordinarily unknown and catastrophic times in my personal life, I have opened my mind to forms of communication from as many different dimensions that hitherto didn’t warrant a lick of my attention.

Below is the dream. I welcome any assistance interpreting it. At the end, I will comment briefly on some of the images, providing a little context…or none at all. I did zero internet research on the dream and have no plans to do so.

A medium-sized beaver is swimming fast just under the surface of the water, gliding, in a creek. He or she swims over another beaver, smaller, ingests the smaller beaver with his stomach, and keeps swimming.

I’m somewhere in the creek watching this. Then I’m swimming in the creek as myself, swiftly. Second later, I begin swimming as a beaver, not the aforementioned one, but a separate creature. I have become a beaver but am conscious that I am also a human and I am gliding fast and somewhat in circles. I am highly aware of the movements of my gliding. The color green is present. The water ripples.

Panic grips the beavers in the creek, myself included. There is a rumor that Diana Ross is somewhere nearby. She is not in the creek. The beavers want to see her. I want to see her. It is not The Supremes-era Diana Ross; it is Diana Ross from the cover of her 1980’s album Diana, the one with the black and white photograph of her (pictured here). In the photo her hair is wet. The dream ends.

Dream notes:

I have been collecting beaverwood lately. I have pieces displayed all around me in my writing studio. I recently read a history of the beaver in North America. I once owned Diana and had a poster of that album cover hanging in my room. I had a crush on her. That album, produced by Niles Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic fame, was a monster success. I remember the big hit single from it, “I’m Coming Out.”