The Curious Incident of the Bison in the Night-Terror, or Learning to Welcome Uncertainty

 

I believe -  no, I know - that our dreams carry important messages for us - messages from our unheard selves, to ourselves. Most often, mine are not clear dictates, magical incantations, or compelling omens, but rather a mixed-up bag of suppressed feeling, hope, and worry, dressed and tossed with the detritus of the day’s matter. My dreams, like my waking imagination, are vivid, rich, abundant, and complicated. 

Sometimes I feel plagued or perplexed by dreams. This was so in my first year of graduate school, where I was working through so many things. I kept a dream journal for a few months, but ultimately had to stop because the more I wrote, the more I remembered, and I didn’t have time for that much writing! 

Mostly, I am grateful for my dreams, though, and can’t imagine living without them. They’re like a foreign language I only speak in my sleep: I wake up with odd phrases on my lips that I have to guess at translating. 

While I dream a lot, often with overtones of stress or worry, I don’t remember having had an actual “wake-up screaming nightmare” in my entire adult life. Until 2020. Between our COVID-lockdown-bubble vacation that summer and the early winter of 2022, I had at least four. And they were speaking to me, in late night soft-shouts, bringing vital messages. Maybe even blessings. 

The first came on our second night in a stunning vacation home overlooking Lake Tahoe, generously lent to us by a friend. Our family had taken a few nights away, mostly spent hanging out, playing games, and enjoying the spacious modern house of concrete and endless windows overlooking the forest and lake. It was the perfect place to unwind from the stress of that first pandemic spring. 

I made the mistake of checking my work email on day 2 of our getaway, though, and found a message expressing concern - and it was the tip of what I rightly intuited was a massive iceberg. We’re talking Titanic-scale, here. I spent the next two and a half years chipping away at the iceberg. But on that vacation day, I sent a brief reply with a short-term suggestion and a promise to delve into the matter upon return. And I set the matter aside. Or, rather, I pushed it into my subconscious. 

That night, my husband and I slept comfortably in a spacious ground-floor bedroom nestled into the rocky hillside, with a stunning view: two walls of floor-to-ceiling glass with nothing to see but trees, boulders, sky, and blue-green water. We’d had a lovely evening and, the good sleeper of us two, I’d fallen asleep easily and soundly. 

In the middle of the night, though, my husband shook me awake with a start. I had woken him up with my whisper-screaming: that thing where you’re trying to scream in a dream but you can’t turn up your volume?  Well, I was soft-shouting a phrase I’m quite certain I had never used in my waking life:  “DAMN YOU, F-ERS! DAMN YOU, F-ERS!” Again and again. I shocked and rattled us both. 

This remonstration was not without cause, though. In my dream, someone - or some mob - had broken into our house (that dream house, where I lived with both my husband and daughter and my long-passed parents). They had taken baseball bats and smashed every window and every surface in the whole house. Tables, counters, cupboards, walls - everything was a shattered disaster zone. I felt furious,  heartbroken, violated and vulnerable. And, whisper-screaming, I couldn’t fully voice my rage. Awake now, and badly shaken, I curled up and tried to get back to sleep. But it was a fitful night after that. 

Two or three months later, back from vacation and hard at work again, I had my second vocal night-terror. I dreamt I was at work, late at night, all alone, and on the phone with our campus Public Safety, trying to describe the person coming at me, across the office, with a big knife. I kept whisper-screaming, until my husband and I were simultaneously awakened with a start: “IT’S AN OLD, WHITE MAN!” I soft-shouted into the dream-phone. “IT’S AN OLD, WHITE MAN!” Hmm, I thought, upon waking. File that one away under work stress.  I was unsettled, but eventually returned to sleep.

The following March - five or six months later and almost exactly a year since the COVID lock-down - I had my third vocal night terror. This time, a perfectly fine dream about my quarantine bubble was suddenly disrupted by an intruder - a youngish white guy this time -  and I was left hoarsely trying to scream, "IT’S THE BAD MAN, WITH A KNIFE!” By this time, my husband, who suffers from a chronic sleep disorder, was getting tired of waking me up to shut me up. And I was learning to shake it off, roll over, and doze off again pretty quickly. This one seemed pretty cliché, anyway. 

My last night terror was quite a while later - the following December or January - and it was more interesting. I was in my final weeks in the dean role I’d decided it was time to step away from, and I was counting the weeks until my sabbatical. I was eager for the opportunity to refresh, restore, and explore a new direction. I didn’t know what would come next (I still don’t quite know), but the decision to step down, and the timing, felt absolutely, intuitively right. And still, it was scary. 

This dream began peacefully: I was lying in a field of tall grass. The image is both a calming, restful one and, for me, potentially ominous. It not only takes me back to the freedom of childhood, but it also resonates with a dream my mother confided to me, just a few months before she died. At 83, she was confined to a wheelchair and suffering dementia. She couldn’t remember who was living and who had died, so she conferred often with souls on both sides of that divide. 

In the daytime, she was elderly, suffering, and perched delicately on the edge. In her dream, though, she was a young girl, walking in a broad field of deep grass, searching for a place to lie down and rest. Her dream and her quest were fulfilled not long after.

So my dream began with this calm but ambivalent scene: lying in a field of tall grass. Soon, I heard a heavy snuffling and glanced over to see a massive bison approaching. I froze in panic. It came closer and, with its hot, wet, whiskery snout, began nuzzling my ear. I cringed, then tried to relax. Tried to still myself and slow my breathing, to match the beast’s heavy breath. Is it going to trample me? I wondered. Or just sniff me and wander off? 

Cut. 

Then, Scene 2 of the dream: in a different part of the field, a herd of bison is coming at me. Approaching quickly. I start to run, stumble - because apparently my knee is artificial and inept even in dreams - and try to crawl clumsily through the tall grass as fast as I can. HELP! HELP! HELP! I whisper-scream. My soft-shouts wake my husband, once again, who wakes me. Oh good grief, I think. Bison? Really? Don’t try to decipher this one until you’ve had some coffee, I think, and drop back to sleep.

Fast forward to October 2022, when I attend my church’s annual retreat for women up at the glorious Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg. It’s a wonderful multi-generational gathering where we take time to reflect, learn, form deeper relationships, and relish the beauty of creation. In one of our group discussion sessions, I had shared feelings of uncertainty and worry about my professional future. A wise woman friend shared a practice she adopted during a period of anxiety: asking “What if…?” questions. Let yourself pose the question, she suggested, and don’t answer it. Just let it sit. And maybe try putting some positive “what ifs” out there. 

Immediately, in that beautiful but dry, sunny, often fire-endangered landscape, I wondered, and asked aloud, “What if the rains come, and everything turns green?” 

By mid January, we were well into a torrential rainy season, with atmospheric rivers that had not only turned the East Bay hills glowing green but caused floods and mudslides. “The force is strong with his one,” my friend wryly noted. 

That wet, windy January was also to be my last month as Dean, and I was just a couple of weeks from the deadline I had set for stepping down from what I had once imagined as my forever “dream job” and commencing a 5-month sabbatical. I was breathless with anticipation - and panic. I had begun looking for my next professional opportunity but hadn’t found the right thing yet. Where would I land? 

Hoping to catch my breath, I attended one of Br. Camillus Chavez’s guided meditations in the College chapel. As I rested by the bubbling spring in the imagined underground garden where I often end up in such sessions, a new “what if” nudged its way into my mind. 

 What if each threat in my dreams was actually, or also, a blessing? What if the destruction could be a prelude to remodeling, a fresh start? What if the men with weapons were coming to open a box or to offer protection from some other harm? The bison, perhaps coming to bless me with ancient wisdom and strength? What if…?

Something unlocked and shifted for me in that moment, in that question. It gave me a new way of bringing wonder, openness, and breath into even the darkest moments of panic and fear. Of turning uncertainty towards possibility.

These days, as I continue on my journey with so much still unknown and undetermined, I try to ask not “What if X happens and my world ends?” But, rather, What if  I get what I need? What I desire? What I deserve? Or, or better yet, an undeserved blessing, some mercy for the road ahead?

This little practice is helping to change my attitude toward risk, unsought change, and the intrusion of the unknown in my life. I find I’m ruminating less. I’m resting easier with an unmarked path. And the night terrors have subsided. 

Unsure, uncertain? Maybe give it a try.

Curiosity. Wonder. What if…?