dream journal, baby bird

Busy night’s dreaming – a lot of dreams within dreams, or dreams about movies, which I subsequently recounted to people in later dreams. The first part that I can recall involved seeing a trailer for what appeared to be a low-brow comedy: a man was scattering his late mother’s ashes while wearing a speedo; another man woke up in bed next to an old man who shouted at his that he was going to be late for class; someone said it was better than it looked, and that it was actually an adaptation of a series of satirical SF tales from a few decades ago. The shouting old man was the other man’s professor, his appearance part of a device called the “Self-Referential Alarm Clock” which wakes you with flash-forwards of stuff happening later in the day that you’ll miss if you don’t get up.

Subsequent dream imagery – a trio whose drummer was a cat (he was good, but not very loud – you really had to listen hard to hear his solos); two koalas the size of adult humans (scary); handful_ofdust’s son was picking up kitty litter gravel and putting it in his mouth, so not knowing what else to do, I held him upside down so it would fall back out. Another movie, with a plot involving some kind of Faustian bargain: the Devil was played by James Earl Jones as an old-time medicine-show huckster, in a bravura performance that I kept telling everyone about for the rest of the dream. He was also selling some kind of health-insurance scheme that involved sending purchasers back to the 1990s, when gym memberships were apparently cheaper than they are now.


Waking – just before reaching work I came across a fledgling sparrow in the parking lot at the corner. One leg was dragging, and the fledgling was crawling across the asphalt by pushing itself along on its wings, towards the adults who appeared to be chirping encouragement from the tailgate of a parked truck. I watched for a while, unsure what to do. I’d learned recently that many birds leave the nest before they can fly, and live on the ground for a while, still under the care of their parents; for this reason you should not automatically try to rescue them or return them to their nests. The dragging leg worried me, but I’ve seen plenty of one-legged birds. I just wasn’t sure that the wings and the other legs worked. When the wind blew the fledgling off-course, however, I gave in, picked it up and carried it to the truck it had been trying to reach, figuring it was safer there than in the middle of the lot. www.helpbabybirds.ca, which I checked when I got into work, reassured me that even uninjured fledglings push themselves along on their wings like that when they first leave the nest, but I’ll probably go check the area at lunch time. In any case the website implies the local wildlife rehab are too overwhelmed to take songbirds.

ETA -- Nope. Dead where I left it. Now I wish I'd been brave enough to put it out of its misery when I found it. So hard to know what to do with live things.

Dream Journal, Baby Bird

Busy night’s dreaming – a lot of dreams within dreams, or dreams about movies, which I subsequently recounted to people in later dreams. The first part that I can recall involved seeing a trailer for what appeared to be a low-brow comedy: a man was scattering his late mother’s ashes while wearing a speedo; another man woke up in bed next to an old man who shouted at his that he was going to be late for class; someone said it was better than it looked, and that it was actually an adaptation of a series of satirical SF tales from a few decades ago. The shouting old man was the other man’s professor, his appearance part of a device called the “Self-Referential Alarm Clock” which wakes you with flash-forwards of stuff happening later in the day that you’ll miss if you don’t get up.

Subsequent dream imagery – a trio whose drummer was a cat (he was good, but not very loud – you really had to listen hard to hear his solos); two koalas the size of adult humans (scary); handful_ofdust’s son was picking up kitty litter gravel and putting it in his mouth, so not knowing what else to do, I held him upside down so it would fall back out. Another movie, with a plot involving some kind of Faustian bargain: the Devil was played by James Earl Jones as an old-time medicine-show huckster, in a bravura performance that I kept telling everyone about for the rest of the dream. He was also selling some kind of health-insurance scheme that involved sending purchasers back to the 1990s, when gym memberships were apparently cheaper than they are now.


Waking – just before reaching work I came across a fledgling sparrow in the parking lot at the corner. One leg was dragging, and the fledgling was crawling across the asphalt by pushing itself along on its wings, towards the adults who appeared to be chirping encouragement from the tailgate of a parked truck. I watched for a while, unsure what to do. I’d learned recently that many birds leave the nest before they can fly, and live on the ground for a while, still under the care of their parents; for this reason you should not automatically try to rescue them or return them to their nests. The dragging leg worried me, but I’ve seen plenty of one-legged birds. I just wasn’t sure that the wings and the other legs worked. When the wind blew the fledgling off-course, however, I gave in, picked it up and carried it to the truck it had been trying to reach, figuring it was safer there than in the middle of the lot. www.helpbabybirds.ca, which I checked when I got into work, reassured me that even uninjured fledglings push themselves along on their wings like that when they first leave the nest, but I’ll probably go check the area at lunch time. In any case the website implies the local wildlife rehab are too overwhelmed to take songbirds.

ETA -- Nope. Dead where I left it. Now I wish I'd been brave enough to put it out of its misery when I found it. So hard to know what to do with live things.