Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle

Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle

Most of my dreams are in color. Sometimes they're extravagant with color, especially with the bright crimson of arterial blood. This dream is black and white, but not the black and white and grays of a photograph. The blacks are deep, iridescent, jet black; the whites are brilliant flashes. Annie and I are at our home, which in the dream is where a high plain meets the foothills of mountains. The place is wild. The mountains which loom behind us are no Ozarks or Smokies or Adirondacks; they are Canadian Rockies, only wilder: great, jagged masses of obsidian and ice, with trees as gnarled as they would have to be to live there. The plain sweeps away to infinite distance in a way that is as severe as the mountains: in all that great sweep of land, no sheltering grove of trees, no comforting hollows, no music of flowing water, no human hearthfires. But our house: large, airy, open, warm, bright with sunlight pouring in. Outside, a cold wind sweeps across the plain, swirls around the mountains. I am wearing a certain kind of shirt, a work shirt that is very well made, either of soft-tanned leather or some good quality wool. It fits just right. It makes me comfortable against the wind. I have a coat that is good and serviceable and goes well with the shirt and would get me into a decent restaurant without the snooty waiter scraping his eyes down my body. My pants are jet black: an unfaded version of those Frisko jeans I used to wear as a fisherman. Their deep black color is laced with streaks of white, the way my pants get when I've been working with sheetrock. The black throws off glinty blueblack highlights; the white streaks dazzle like new snow in sunlight. It's day inside the house, night outside - deepest, blackest imaginable night - slashed often, and violently, by white lightning. The lightning seems intent on reminding us that it is great bolts of electricity. There are wild animals and domestic animals. There is an antelope with antlers which give off intense sparks generated by creatures that are like fireflies, but whose light is greater, more electric than fireflies. Our domestic animals are around: chickens, ducks, dogs, cats. None of them is a fighter or protector; they tend to be on the cuddly side. Our domestic animals, and ourselves, are being threatened by the wild animals. The great windy plain, the looming mountains seethe with threatening movements of wild animals. Our spaniel is especially afraid. Now comes a panther, a great black beast whose obsidian coat is part of the night, whose scream is part of the wind, who gives off violent sparks of light from its long white fangs and from its blueblack fur; these sparks are kin to the lightning that splits the night. Annie is loading the rifle, a Winchester bolt-action .30-06 like the one I killed my second buck with. She is ready, she does not shrink back, she is willing to fight the panther. As she loads the rifle, the dream deliberately places the long phallic rifle, held in her left hand with barrel angled down, directly in front of her crotch, like some gun ad from Soldier of Fortune magazine or one of those posters we see in back of plumbing shops with a bikinied babe holding a big pipe wrench or power drill nestled in her crotch. In the dream, it doesn't seem nasty; it seems right. As she loads the rifle, there is the further explicit feeling of her sliding the male cartridge into the rifle's female chamber, where she holds the rifle across her crotch. She gets the rifle loaded, but doesn't know what to do next. The panther charges, all loping obsidian blackness and lightning-animated power, screaming with the force of the wind across the plain. She hands me the rifle. I aim, fire. The muzzle flash merges with the lightning. The panther explodes, disintegrating as its scream returns to the wind, its blackness to the night, its power to the lightning.