Bobcat Dreams
The types of information that came to me in dreams post psychedelics
The first dream premonition I experienced was about a bobcat.
That dream occurred during Christmas, shortly after I’d met my former teacher who I call The Shaman. (I give a more detailed explanation of why I use this term in an earlier post here: The English Teacher and The Shaman.)
I don’t celebrate Christian holidays and I find family gatherings traumatic, so I’ve spent many holidays alone. Don’t feel so bad for me—for many years breaks from school were the only times I could truly check out. In the deep dark of Montana winter, I cross-country skied, dreamt and wrote.
Except, alone that winter of 2019 in Livingston, I dreamt I killed a bobcat. It wasn’t a dream I wanted to have. In fact, immediately upon waking I wanted to unsee it and give its knowledge back.
In the dream, I saw a snow white cat looking back at me, sauntering away. A flash of knowing that I had killed the bobcat woke me. It was 4 a.m, the time when I often wake up from my deepest dreams. I texted The Shaman about the dream. He responded immediately.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he texted.
“But I don’t want to kill it,” I replied. “Not even in my dreams.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do except love it,” he said.
A few weeks later, I struck a bobcat with my car in Yankee Jim Canyon, just outside Yellowstone National Park. The incident is detailed in my story “Paws,” published in the literary magazine Faultline.
After the bobcat, I had other troubling dreams. The snakes were gone, replaced by nightmares about The Shaman and LA, where he lived and wanted me to move. In the dreams, I was continually lost in airports and hostile malls, led astray by The Shaman. In my dreams, he could shapeshift and fly. He had a lab full of chemicals, but no gardens, no plants. I didn’t want the knowledge from the dreams, but over time I accepted the clues they gave me.
When my consciousness was still stitched to my teacher’s way of understanding the world, I began to see dreams as inherently true and enmeshed in reality—true as parts of our individual psychology and true in archetypal senses as well. But even more terrifying was the idea that some people dreamt dreams that were literally true. Many people want their dreams to come true, but to me the idea became terrifying.
I didn’t get out of this scary loop until I quit my teacher’s groups and started dreaming about Rez ball.