Scribblings with Green Chalk

I like looking at owls. In case you didn’t know, now you know. I love how serious and quizzical they look.

I dreamt of owls last night. And maybe because I went to bed at 7 pm and slept over 10 hours, there were many of them. I don’t dream of animals often, which, as Paul Shepard confirms in The Others, is a sad truth about growing up. As a child, I used to have dreams crowded with mostly wolves, then dogs, cats, snakes, and owls… Thank God, pre-Christmas tiredness made me move back in time.

***

Because I cannot put it so beautifully, I quote:

The perception of animals ceased to be only a recognition. First swallowed in substance, then swallowed in thought, they were finally incorporated in psychic structures.

(Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, p. 3

Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye.

(Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals, p. 2)

[animals in dreams]

The child’s absence from its own dream is part of normal unselfconsciousness, without the “self,” “you,” or “they.” The child is said sometimes to be frightened by such dreams but not frightened in them.[...] These dreamt animals may be, very early in life, the dispersed elements of the unknown self — the body’s sounds, contractions, upheavals, secretions — and then also disguises of familiar people in stressful circumstances of ordinary experience.[...]As the child gets older, animal dreams diminish and a self emerges more frequently, as do familiar faces. [...] Throughout our lives animals in dreams may continue to signify unresolved concerns, intolerable truth, or interpersonal uncertainty. They are not a random choice of symbolic vehicles of the unconscious mind but a continuation of the maturing processes of humankind. They are nurturant among small children because animals are already synomymous with the mind’s drive to find order and the heart’s desire to affirm given reality.

(The Others, pp.75-76)

[marginal animals, owls among them]

Categories defined by human observers inevitably collide with animals at the edges of categories. Such confusing forms elicit strong responses, but even the ambiguous forms may be classified. Such “misfit” animals may be seen as anomalies, superior or diabolical, more interesting than the rest, for they challenge the very grounding of our thought in category making.

(The Others, p. 59)

Judaism and Christianity found other zoological, categorical equivalents of evil, such as the twilight forms (owls and bats at dusk), those between earth and water (toads and other amphibians at the streams edge), and those who undergo transformation (larvae, nymphs, and moulting forms). [...] Owls are the demonic equivocator of day and night; the larvae of insects and amphibians are are the deceivers of appearance. The image or call of each can be appropriated to signify disarray.

(The Others, p. 67)