An idealist wants to green the desert. He gets one seedling pine from a service that provides them by the thousands, the millions, to anyone wanting them. Seeks a good planting spot. I go along. Keep seeing species of mushroom I've only seen in books before. Stalked puffballs; gray-ochre bellshaped fungi with petal-like cracks; liver mushroom. Oyster fungus with a vivid green-brown cap & fire-red stalk. Huger, more, till the whole desert floor is PAVED in stubby, leathery, colorful fungi.

At the far edge of the mushroom desert, a science foundation. Walk between the zoology and botany labs. See a squirrel with a long, long tail, bright turquoise-blue. Someone's experiment escaped!

We meet a guy who's made a second long blue tale tail [oops!] into a bola--tied small stones to each end. Throws the spinning bola and it wraps around the squirrel. He says "Strong evolutionary pressure against such a showy tail--makes you too visible, vulnerable."

But the squirrel wriggles out of bondage, chomps down on the bola and carries it off! Now it's a two-tail blue-tail squirrel. Ha ha on the hunter!

Ahead is a stable. We walk through. Dark inside. Huge eyes gleam, higher than mine. I assume a horse. It follows us in the dark. When we emerge into light, find it's a horse-sized DOG, bony, hairless, brown leathery skin. Plods along behind us. Odd aura or character. Ill? Exhausted?

People in the gardens ahead also act odd. Cold stares. Them I can read: something's taken them over, like in The Body Snatchers. They know I'm not one of them. Two Asian guys glare icily. Will they attack me? But they all collapse to the ground! Unlike the Pod People in Body Snatchers, they don't gain strength from the transformation--it weakens them. Like the horse-dog?

I step over them to flee... and one rouses and bites my leg with his snake-fangs. Oh, great, they have FANGS! I'm bleeding, I'll get infected! Wake in fear.

WHAT'S IT MEAN?

• Desert: loneliness. I'm chronically ill, in frequent pain, broke, shy, single and feeling unloved.
• Pines may green it: pun on "pining"--longing. Acknowledging the loneliness may be the first toward curing it.
• Colorful mushrooms: intense, strange, colorful dreams like this. It's a dream about dreamwork! Stretches that others'd call empty and barren--no trees, no conventional happiness--leave room for other, exotic kinds of growth.
• Squirrel with a marvelous tail: vanity, showing off. Echoes a squirrel in Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter who lets himself be seduced by the Lady of Winter, and freezes; though he's reborn in spring.
• A blue tale: up to this point my tale has mostly been sad. Yet in other dreams like Blue Crystals, luminous blue has meant intuition.
• A showy tail endangers you: sexual showing off attracts attention--and predators.
• A showy tale endangers you: telling/drawing/singing such shamanic dreams attracts attention--and predators.
• Squirrel frees itself: all creatures face attacks, and learn to fend them off; many are showy just the same. I can be too.
• Horse-dog: ?!?
• Tired/ill: me, in the throes of classic shamanic illness--sickness that pries you out of your tribe's conventions & beliefs, clearing room for magic.
• Hostile pod-people: conformists. Their attack echoes the bola hunter's claim "showing off is dangerous."
• Fangs, fear of infection: the dream blends zombies, Body Snatchers and vampires. I really don't like the burbs!
• ACTION: prepare to show off your tail/tale... elsewhere. Suburbia ain't the place.

WHAT'S IT MEAN, AGAIN?

Write down the dream. Then I go out and get the mail. A flyer from dream-artist Rachael Dutton; she's having a slide-talk. On the flyer is a dream-painting, Flanders: a giant dog with dark patches that form the blurry image of... a horse.

Flanders by Rachael Dutton, 1981, oil on canvas, 3x4'

Guess I have to revise that one:

• Horse-dog: Synchronicity or ESP.

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