What the Hoot!!

I did not recognize the owl in my dream until I woke up and remembered how he’d swooped onto a branch of the Great Oak twenty years ago when I was fighting with my father. My father had not wanted me to leave my husband, but I had already left. The arguing kept escalating until suddenly there was a literal whoosh and—I believed it was a flying cat, it was that huge—the owl landed before us on a low-slung limb, and stared at us, a living reprimand.  How soon we forgot ourselves, and all our reasons for arguing. The owl became everything. The mystery became everything. We stood there, the two of us somehow puny before the owl—and for days it was all we could talk about, how that owl had appeared out of no where to stun us into getting along.

I think my puppy, Fenomeno, the one with the two dark rings around his eyes, recalled the owl.  Fenomeno was definitely in the dream, and all the other dogs, and even a few cats and maybe a parrot.  It started out as an anxiety dream:  Would the dogs kill the cat or maybe the parrot?  Then maybe it was Fenomeno who morphed into an owl.  The owl was certainly as big as Fenomeno if not bigger.  The kind of awe I’d felt before the owl who’d come to save me from arguing with my father triumphed over my anxiety once again and I realized that I lived in the Peaceable Kingdom. 

Now I had to figure out how to transport the Peaceable Kingdom to the United States.  This is where real life intrudes.  I am worrying these days about flying across the Atlantic with five dogs. In my dream, my daughter Lucy volunteered to carry the owl.  She had one of those zippered Adidas gym bags just big enough to hold an over-sized owl.  Lucy zipped the zipper and the dreamscape shifted.

Next thing I know I’m in my other daughter’s Manhattan apartment, the one she left when her son was born.  I unzip the gym bag and am horrified by what I find:  the owl is apparently dead, featherless and trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey.  The skin has that putrid yellow of unroasted Butterball, but there are finely stitched together incisions and wounds marking the entire carcass with criss-crossing bloody lines.  The cats got it, I think. The dogs got it, I think. The zipper got it, time got it, travel got it, displacement got it, leaving Italy got it, customs got it…all the plausible things that could have caused the death of my owl ran through my dreaming as I tenderly lifted the remains from the bag.

But then I felt the feeble heart beat, the tenuous breathing.  What do I do? What do I do? I nearly dropped the near-dead thing in my fright.

Upon waking, I immediately embarked on research into owl totems and symbolisms. I came up with this:

To see an owl in your dream symbolizes wisdom, insight, magic, expanded awareness and virtue.  But the owl is also synonymous with death, darkness and the unconscious. The appearance of an owl may be telling you to let go of the past or certain negative behaviors. To see a dead owl in a dream signifies illness or death. Death in this sense may be a symbolic death, as in an important life transition or end of a negative habit.

Woah, I thought.  Yes. Yes. I thought. I am surely not ill or on the brink of death. That trussed up near dead owl must mean “important life transition.”  I AM in transition. Whew! For a moment I’d worried the dream was saying that I would die if I went back to the States, or one of my dogs would die during the transatlantic crossing. Whew. It’s just transition, I kept telling myself.

But of course, the dream would not let me off that easily.  It worked on me all the train-ride into my Rome job:  that image of the lacerated, trussed up owl carcass, of opening the bag expecting to see the live animal, and finding that Frankenstein-owl instead, its being almost-alive somehow worse than had it been fully dead, given its woundedness, its featherlessness—the monstrous horror.  What does this mean? What does this mean? I cried out to myself even though I know from a lifetime of teaching poetry and symbolism that an image is powerful precisely because it cannot be pinned to black velvet with a single “meaning”—but gathers mystery as it keeps working on us, leading us deeper.

When I emerged from the train at Termini Station, wondering if I should write my energy healer, Anna, about the appearance of the owl in my dreaming, the moment the question arose in my mind, I was assaulted by this owl in the window of a station department store:

I took this picture of the owl with my iPhone and sent it instantly to Anna, with the caption:  “Owls are in my dreaming and now being mirrored in my waking.  Just to let you know.” It occurred to me that she might think me nuts for sending such a message, but then again, she is a shaman, and perhaps I could count on her not only to get the owl, but to communicate with it, translate its message.

I felt my energy swell into unexpected places. I was in the dreaming, walking in all dimensions as I made may way down Via Nazionale toward the school where I work.  All of Rome glistened with hyper over-realness:  pavement pebbles, brick mortar, quicksilver fiberglass of cars. My crown chakra was wide open and I felt little chills of energy passing down my spine, shivers of energy. This is a true visitation, I kept believing ..the owls have ripped the veil, I marveled and, at that moment of thinking this, passed the window of a jewelry store and found the following necklaces on display.

The presence of these owls came over me as an energetic owl-gasm, blossoms of light filling me as each jeweled or non-jeweled owl eye fixed me in its gaze.

“Just trust them!”  Anna’s message reached me as I stood before all that silver staring. “Trust them and be gentle with them. And with yourself.”

On the train-ride back to Spoleto, I created a new playlist for my iPhone, all songs about roads and traveling up or down them, all songs (and there are zillions of them) about not knowing the way, but finding the way even so.