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A Bear In The Woods

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Late yesterday Ben revealed this interesting bit of information in the comments:

“Had a dream last night about two bears fighting and ripping themselves apart– complete with sound effects. Had to get up and take a walk to try and shake the images… Thanks gang.”

Naturally I found this disturbing, so I texted it to a friend who I thought could offer some advice. Here’s his reply from the deep woods, translated from the original Ursus Textish.

Hey, Bart here.

Thanks for sending that strange comment from your reader “Ben”. I don’t know what his dream was really about, but I have heard that humans named “Ben” have more than their share of bear-related identity issues. Guys named “Smokey” and “Yogi” also suffer, I’m told.

People get weird ideas about bears. Either we’re crazed killing machines or we’re dancing tangos and having a picnic down in the glade. Cruel or cute, with no middle ground. That’s us.

The truth is – most bears are boring. Really, really dull. They’re like your fat Uncle Ralph sleeping in front of the TV, without the recliner, or the TV. A lot of us are set in our ways and not at all interested in stuff outside our own little world. Plus, we’re dirty and smelly and not very good company, even for our own kind.

And you know that question people are always asking, wondering if bears do some basic biological stuff in the woods? Well we do, and it’s not pretty.

So I could see why a person with the same name as a famous bear would have dreams where bears are violently erasing themselves from the picture. That’s the fantasy of someone trying to find himself – someone who needs to get a hairy obstacle out of the way before he starts.

It’s not about us, it’s about YOU, Buddy. I’m just sayin’. I hope you can work out your problems. Almost time to hibernate. See ya’ in the spring!

Your pal,
Bart

Bart may be right, or perhaps Ben fell asleep with the TV on and subliminally ingested this advertisement for a British Salmon processor:

Where do dreams come from?

113 thoughts on “A Bear In The Woods”

  1. Rise and Shine Babooners:

    Such a question! Volumes of theories and research have been written about this over centuries. And the answer is still “We aren’t sure.” Medical sleep specialists probably have some of the more accurate thoughts and theories about brain activity during sleep and all related variables.

    But dreams are one of the most fascinating human or other species experiences. I love watching my dog sleep, then dream as she sleep yips and chases rabbits.

    Off to the day.

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    1. I agree Jacque. There’s something about watching the dog dreaming with all four legs twitching in cadence as though running across open field and closed muzzle bark. But is it a dream or a nightmare? Are they chasing rabbits or being chase by a bear?

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    2. I love watching dogs dream too. I wonder what their dreams are like. Are they all fight and flight or predator and prey? Are there ever emotions involved?

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      1. I heard some neurologists talk once about dogs, and what we assume are dreams are really seizure-like discharges of neuro-electric energy and not dreams at all.

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  2. I thought dreams came from eating cold pizza and coke before going to bed!

    For me, the problem with knowing what your dreams mean is the same as going to a psychic. If you can interpret or believe the information, what the heck do you do with it? And I’m not sure I’d want to assign a meaning to dreaming about bears ripping themselves apart. I’d much rather think that too much cold pizza and too many tv commercials about bears and salmon cause my bad dreams!

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  3. a good and gracious morning to You All
    i think Dreams are just brains at play – sometimes they play rough.
    mother nature played rough with us yesterday – somewhere, a car hit a power pole and took out power in our neighborhood from noon to 9 pm. at six i went to bed, but unfortunately didn’t dream of a warm sunny place.
    warm again this morning – light and heat are good things.

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  4. Well, dearie, when a daydream and a reverie love each other very very much, they give each other a “special hug”…or maybe it’s the cold pizza.

    Glad you’re warm again BiB! Heat is good this time of year.

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  5. Space alien goats download our brains, analyze the contents, can’t make heads or tails of it, so reload it any old way. Our brains try to reshuffle it back into a semblance of order so we can function when we wake up. Sometimes, we actually remember the process.

    Why else would random people from my past that I never really knew or gave much thought to suddenly make an appearance?

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  6. I vaguely recall something about the collective unconscious, which has made sense of dreams for me in the past, but I’ve never really read the Carl Jung stuff. I feel so lucky that my dreams are benign and not scary – I’m often working working working on something I’m trying to finish, but keep being detoured. Huh, kind of like my life.

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  7. Both MIG and Barbara touched on my question. What is to be said about those that rarely dream? As my wife will attest, as soon as I stop moving I fall asleep. When I wake up at the same time every day, I don’t recall any dreams. Perhaps twice a year or so I remember dreaming. However my wife can recall at least one dream every morning.

    Dale, thanks for reaching out to Bart. As I read his text, I heard his voice as if it was yesterday.

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    1. I think maybe we dream alot more than we think… we just can’t remember it. I seem to remember my dreams more when the moon is in the full phase – but wonder if I’m dreaming all the time but just not remembering? Am I dreaming now?

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      1. Not that I’ve made a scientific experiment out of when I remember my dreams or anything — just seems like when I do have a particularly vivid dream that I remember in the morning, I’ve noticed that it’s been a full moon.

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      2. Hadn’t thought about the cycles of the moon – that’s interesting. I will have to keep some records and check that out.

        I find that if I go through a phase where I don’t sleep well for a stretch, when sleep comes back I have a lot of vivid dreams for a few weeks, as if my unconscious mind is making up for lost time.

        Maybe there’s some reason you sleep better during a full moon, and the dream activity correlates with that.

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      3. I don’t sleep as well when the moon is full. I think I can remember dreams better when I’m not sleeping as soundly.

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    2. a shrink i was going to asked me to note my dreams and to pay attention to them. i had prior to that not thought about them at all, since then it is enjoyable and telling as to what my dreams are about. i think dan if you make an effort to pay attention ( tell yourself before the crash and burn you will remember) maybe put a pad of papber and a pen next to the bed to write it down. it supried the heck out of me. a whole new thing.

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  8. Good morning, wake up, this is not a dream,

    I think at least some of our dreams are based on things that have happened to us. The main reoccurring dream I have is a nightmare about not being able to find the classroom for a college class or not even knowing when the class is being held. I learned that nightmares similar to my reoccurring nightmare are experienced by other people. I think that a lot of former college students might have a reoccurring nightmare similar to mine. It is my opinion that the “hoops” that we are forced to jump through to get a college degree are the source of these nightmares.

    When I was a kid I had very scarey nightmares that ended when I woke up thinking that my hands were fighting each other. I don’t know where those dreams came from. They might have been from some kind of struggle I was having with growing up.

    I have a lot of dreams that slip from my memory soon after I wake up. I wonder if I have some dreams that I forget before I wake up.

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    2. A recurring dream that haunted my father plays a dramatic role in the book I wrote about my parents. I only have one recurring dream. Three times or four I have dreamed that college authorities came and got me so they could make me take German all over again! So there I am in this advanced German class and I totally faked it getting through German One and Two. Ah, the terror! Ah the flop sweat and fear panting!

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      1. Steve, your dream fits in with the reoccurring dreams I have about college classes and with a few others I have heard about.

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    3. My daughter went through a period of several months where she had nightmares and night terrors off and on – and she wouldn’t remember a thing in the morning (but her parents would, as we were awakened by the crying out and whimpering). Since this seemed like something perhaps to worry about, I did a little research, asked some questions, and found out that with little kids it’s often how they process difficulties they are having in their awake lives or developmental hurdles that need to be jumped without having to actually live through some of the trauma when they are awake. Or at least that’s the theory…seemed to hold true for Daughter, anyway. She was a happy kid when she was awake (still is, mostly).

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    4. Yes, Jim, count one more post-graduate trauma victim here! I don’t really remember grad school being so difficult, but the dreams recurring a few times each year SINCE grad school (1980) tell a whole different story. In the dreams, I’m always halfway through the semester before I realize that I haven’t gone to any classes but I’ve paid the tuition and I don’t know where the classes are being held and finals are the next day but the lines are soooooooooo long to even get help finding my classes. And there’s this horrible sinking feeling that I’ve blown it AGAIN!

      No thanks for the memory.

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    5. Oh, and while I’m thinking on it – I don’t recall specific academic nightmares (though I’m sure I had a few), I do remember a very odd work nightmare in which I was trying to climb out of a web page with data tables embedded in data tables…wound up having to get into the code side of the page and climbed up the HTML tags to get out. Man was that weird. (I was working on a project with a lot of tables on the pages for layout purposes at the time…)

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  10. I’m going to duck in and out all day on this one. I dream furiously, often, vividly and usually in color but with a hallucinatory script that makes no sense. Once, to prevent forgetting dreams afterward, I slept with a notepad so I could record the things when I woke. I remember the first entry in that: “This duck has a propeller instead of feet.”

    MIG probably has it right about the space alien goats. She forgot to mention that they have a slightly sick sense of humor that often leads them to play tricks on us when we can’t defend ourselves. Space alien goats think it is funny to send me dreams about American presidents. I could have been scared in that dream where Dubya was chasing me in that old Victorian home with a pistol, but I never got scared because, well, it was just George W. Bush! after me and I couldn’t take him seriously as a pistol shot. It was disgustingly easy to keep three or four rooms ahead of him, the doofus.

    And maybe some dreams come from God. I fell asleep on Thanksgiving Day and was gonna be late going to the home of a gracious hostess in a family I didn’t really know. But then I got this dream in which a black bear was eating my crotch, and that was better than an alarm clock! I hate it when bears eat my crotch. And I showed up when I was asked to come, give or take 15 seconds.

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    1. Do bears only make good alarm clocks during the warmer months? Or do they make special alarm clock appearances throughout the year?

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  11. Nice to hear from you, Bart!
    I’m thinking its not that we don’t remember our dreams, its that we don’t remember much of anything, either awake or asleep? As far as where do dreams come from, I think its all reruns, taped and spliced together, with plots and audio added randomly; a Dali-esque computer backup program running via Kaleidescopic Fusion and supported by cold pizza and warm pop consumed after 10pm, as per Verily Sherilee. But – every now and then a problem in real life gets solved during the dream process! Mysterious.

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  12. Oops… fingers slipped… I must be dreaming yet. [pinch] Nope,

    OK, Morning!

    So now I’m spreading influence from my dreams?? Wow…
    Now, see, I thought the dream came from the previous day’s blog where we all talked about animals. And I thought for sure someone had talked about bears fighting… but when I re-read the entries there’s nothing about that… so maybe it was *all* a dream?
    What to make of the fact the dream started with me walking through the woods and it seems the bears were actually flying over my head? Hmmmm…..

    I still have frequent dreams of cows being out and I’m not sure what that’s got to do with anything… must have been a very traumatic experience for me when I had cows to be out…

    I think dreams do come from whatever is in our minds during the day… those little things that hide in the backs of our minds and pick at our subconscious…
    Very very interesting…

    Enjoy the day! — if you want to.

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    2. Ben, I think cows getting out in real life could generate nightmares. I’ll bet that a lot of bad things can happen when cows get out, such as damage to crops and other things. Also, I supose that there can be some big problems rounding them up.

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      1. Rounding up cows is hard! Once two cows got out at this ranch where I go in fall, and I decided it would be a favor to herd them back, so I jumped on a 4-wheeler and tried to act like a border collie. But no matter how carefully I did it, the cows kept slipping off to the side, refusing to go where they should! I was angry and embarrassed, thinking “Here I am with a Master’s Degree in American Studies and I can’t outwit two cows!”

        The answer to that one amazed me. My pal Larry let about 20 cows loose, 29 that soon joined the loose two. Then he herded the whole big bunch back into the corral. He told me it was easier to herd 22 cows than 2. Who woulda thunk it?

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      3. You guys should read Ben Edlund’s comic The Tick, wherein he introduced The Man-Eating Cow.

        My Dad thinks that cows are the dumbest animals on the planet. Because, very frequently, there will be a huge herd all staring at one particular cow and that one particular cow is staring at one particular blade of grass…and this goes on ad infinitum. When, priority-wise, they should be enacting some kind of plan to prevent being eaten by us. Such is my Dad’s logic.

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      4. One of the big transitions in American life was when the farmer switched from knowing “Buttercup” by her color pattern and behavior and instead began to know cows by the tag in their ears that said numbers like 1039.
        That change occurred at the about same time in the treatment of human beings, to which I can attest after working with a hospital, a clinic, medicare, and BC/BS in the last few days.
        Then I went to drop off a form for Social Security at the local office a block from my work. But I could not just leave it. I had to get a number–C34–and wait to be called to hand it to a man. I wanted to say, after reading this blog today, “Do you want me to staple this in my ear?” But the number comes from a 25-year-old Barney Fife guard who would respond legally to my jest. I then waited 35 minutes listening to a woman lecturing them on how they were misusing the words “Net” and “Gross” on her form.

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      5. Ben, are you suggesting that reverse psychology works on cows as well as it does on toddlers????

        Clyde, I would not want to encounter that woman on the subject of assets and liabilities.

        TGitH, If I dream about a man (or possibly “person”) eating cow tonight, I shall sic the Space Alien goats on your brain.

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  13. Dreams are our inadvertent interception of movie and television signals from the city that lives in each of our brains. They say that we only use 10% of our brain’s potential. Well, the other 90% is taken up by a large city/state of mitochondrial sized ‘people.’ Even though these inhabitants are so small, they need so much space because they really like drive-in’s…or, in their case, osmos-in’s.

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    1. Egads!!!! Reminds me of a favorite RD Lang quote: “A schizoprhenic is a person who sees what’s REALLY going on”. RD seemed to be implying that the rest of would be schizoprenic if we hadn’t learned the skill of screening out most of what’s going on. Hmmm – looks like I can’t spell that word?

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      1. Just go with ‘schizoid.’ It makes us sound more like the robotic drones we’re supposed to be. Oh…did I say that…?

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  14. I think there is something to this collective unconscious theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
    which explains why in my dreams I have detailed knowledge about things I’ve never known or read.

    I did a speech on dreams in a freshman year class, about REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) — apparently it’s been observed that everyone dreams, as evidenced by their REMs, but few of those dreams are remembered, and usually just the ones right before waking.

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    1. Dream theories are fascinating and upsetting – it’s best not to delve into them, IMO. One theory says that we are every part of a dream. So, for example, if you’re watching someone you’re attached to leaving on a train with a good-looking woman, you are the train, the guy, the woman with him, etc. From there, identifying all the emotions going on from each part is supposed to produce the “meaning” of the dream.

      Good luck with that!

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    2. I did read Carl Jung (a couple of decades ago…) There are universal symbols that, apparently, we all share. These symbols enter our dreams to give us insights into ourselves or into situations in which we find ourselves. It’s no different from kids working through the growing up process in their dreams.

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  15. Some dreams are obviously our dream life blending with what is going on in the real world. I sleep in front of TV and the radio a lot–with them going, I mean. That explains the dream in which the checkout girl in Lunds wouldn’t ring up the pound of hamburger I was trying to buy. Someone poked it, she said. Well, yes, that was me, I said. She explained that after 9/11 Lunds had a new anti-terrorist policy and wouldn’t sell poked meat. I threw a hissy fit jumping up and down like Donald Duck, howling, “I want my meat! I want my meat! Osama bin Laden does NOT work in the butcher department at Lunds!” Well, it was embarrassing, but you can guess what was the topic on my radio that night.

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    1. actually, it has long been my suspicion that he shaved the beard, donned a hoodie and jeans and DOES in fact work in the butcher dept. at Lunds. Who would think to look for him there?

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      2. how can he be on dialysis and hiding out in the mountains? my understanding was that healthcare was not so good up there.

        i really think he is working at a Starbucks in Chicago

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      3. MIG — He of course is hanging out in town now, not mountains. But people have said that it doesn’t reflect so well on our spying apparatus if we can’t find a 6′ 5″ Arab who needs dialysis frequently.

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  16. Anyone know why every time I post, I get this “Subscribe to WordPress” email??? I
    registered with WordPress a month ago!

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  17. Anybody see Inception ? Dream inside a dream inside a dream… and learning how to populate each others dreams. It got so complicated my brain hurt.

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  18. Geez, Bart, I don’t know where dreams come from… I like the alien goat theory but I’m sure that eating cold pizza and drinking soda at night will create a problem with your overall sleep pattern. I wanted to blame bologna but I never eat any! I think MIG is right – cats know everything.

    My recurring dreams tend to be about houses. Carl Jung might say that the house symbolizes the “self.” I’ve let myself get out of shape and I’ve noticed that the houses in my recent dreams tend to be shabby, dark and have many messy rooms that are connected one to the next to the next. I find myself moving from room to room in the dream, looking for something I used to have, never getting back to the first room I entered. Lost youth? Something I meant to finish and didn’t? Early Alzheimer’s?

    I think other dreams are like mental housecleaning. They refer us back to some project we’ve been working on (like Anna’s data tables and html tags) or something slightly stressful we encountered and dealt with to the best of our ability at the time. Our brains work on it while we’re sleeping and it all comes out in the wash. When I’ve been beading a project, I tend to dream about intricate beadwork. When I’ve been doing lots of weeding, I “see” lots of weeds in my dreams. I really hate it when I dream of losing Pippin. Those dreams wake me up.

    I don’t think our brains ever really stop. I think sleep is just a different mode that our brain switches into. I do think we dream whether or not we’re aware of it or remember. I think the person who could figure out how to tap into the other 90 percent of our brain would be a highly successful person indeed!

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    1. my recurring dreams are about houses too. For years (before I bought my house) I dreamed about the tiny old place my grandmother lived in, that once I got inside it went on and on, sometimes having a ballroom or a vast labyrinth of underground passages.

      I stopped dreaming about that house once I bought mine.

      Now my recurring dream is that for some reason I have sold my little house and am trying in vain to buy it back or at least replace it with something else. I spend the whole dream kicking myself for selling it in the first place.

      Bet Jung would have a field day with that one, but I either can’t or don’t want to have a clue.

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      1. Catherine, I have that dream all the time. And each time, I tell myself that it’s got to be a dream, it’s always a dream, and each time I’m completely convinced it’s real.

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      2. yes, it is VERY real and I wake up short of breath and with my heart pounding. hate it, hate it, hate it, but am glad to know somebody else has it.

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      3. I particularly relate to your house dream. I so loved and felt so secure in the only little house I’d ever owned for 30 years, that long before I eventually moved into the lake cottage my parents left behind, I had many dreams just as you describe. For me, I identified this as separation-anxiety. Separating from the familiar and from my little nest. I, too, tried to buy it back and was heartsick when I couldn’t (in the recurring dream, that is).

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    3. Yep, I have one where I am walking through my house (much larger than my daytime house) and find a huge new room I didn’t know was there…

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  19. So help me, if I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat from the dream where I am trying to figure out where the final is for the college class I just found out I was signed up for that is somewhere in the building I went to Junior High in that has suddenly developed about 5 times the amount of floors and hallways it originally had, but the girls’ locker room is still the same hole it always was, I’m going to um, um, blog at you all until YOU wake up too.

    so there

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    1. MIG, my nightmares about college are very similar to what you just described. I hope you are awake and not having that dream.

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  20. I suspect that there are a lot of dreams that don’t really mean anything, they’re just random thoughts that float through the brain and are gone. Recurrent dreams are different – there must be a reason they keep coming back.

    I’ve read about lucid dreaming – where you can control what happens in the dream if you realize it’s a dream – but I find it very difficult to recognize a dream when I’m in one. There are certain recurrent dreams that tip me off, but in the dream, although I’m considering the possibility that’s it’s a dream, I still believe it’s really real this time, even though it’s always been a dream before.

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  21. My favorite all-time dream. I was visiting the grounds of a sportsman’s club in north-central Minnesota where they had preserved the land so well the fishing was as good as it had been in 1910. I entered the club house, being surprised to see that every piece of fishing gear came from the early years of the 20th century. Stepping out into the club land was like passing through a portal into an earlier time. The trout in the stream were all trophy-sized. But what amazed me was the color of the sky, grass and vegetation. Even the shape of the trees was odd. And it suddenly occurred to me that I had stepped into an Art Deco landscape, like the covers of old outdoor magazines, and everything I could see had been rendered in Art Deco style. I wandered, enraptured, in a world rendered as an Art Deco painting.

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  22. I think the most interesting thread today is how many of us have experienced the “I’m late for a test but am on the other side of town” kind of dream. It makes you wonder what kind of spirit-warping, soul-killing thing school actually is to kids?!

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    1. I just wish the powers that be would stop making the teachers give “assessments” for one thing and another and let them do more teaching.

      (rant restraint engaged)

      Where is Donna these days anyway?

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    2. There is the teacherly oppoiste, as Barbara mentions. Mine is like the “Actor’s Dream,” where you is on stage and everyone is looking at you for the next line and you don’t even know what the play is much less the line. Mine, especially strong after I started doing workshops where the pressure is so much higher, is that I am in front of a class or group and I either do not know the topic or I am supposed to teach a topic I do not know. That is the only dream I ever remember, except I once dreamed a plot for a play to write, knowing I was dreaming a plot to write. I can still remember the plot, which would have been the silliest play ever written, if I could write plays.

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      1. Ironic that you should use a play metaphor. My sister that teaches up north was heavily involved in her some of her school’s extracurricular activities including their play production and Discovery Science. Between one school year and the next, “…all gone, sorry…” She coached her DS kids to win the state championships and did well in the nationals. Worth any continued funding? Naaaaaah….

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  23. When I was teaching, and actually for decades afterward, I would dream of a classroom where I’m screaming at the top of my lungs to try and attain control.

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  24. In a good episode of Northern Exposure due to a northern lights flair up, everybody gets the dreams of someone else in the village.

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  25. Oh, I am too busy today. I still have dreams about my dissertation, and wake up more often than I like having to reassure myself that it is finished and I don’t have any more corrections on it. I will have to wait until tonight to read all of today’s posts.

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  26. Greetings! Interesting subject — I just read a terrific article interviewing a top sleep/dream researcher with very interesting ideas: http://mercola.fileburst.com/PDF/ExpertInterviewTranscripts/Interview-Naiman-sleep-part-1.pdf

    He says that sleep and dreams help form medium and long-term memories after a sort of filtering process. Dr. Naiman says: “You might think of dreaming as a kind of digestion. It’s a digestion of human experience.” You experience a whole bunch of stuff during the day, juggling it around in short term memory, but dreaming at night is a way to compare it with past experiences, decide what’s meaningful and what’s not, what it kept as part of your psyche and what is tossed. Page 10 of the transcript describes this quite nicely.

    Very often my dreams involve people at work, at karate or characters from a favorite show (Star Trek in particular). That or I’m dreaming about houses. Not places I’ve lived in or seen — or they’re vaguely similar to something I’ve seen. But I often dream about the same house for a long time and then another one will come into my dreams. Like someone else said, I’m finding rooms and unused living space that I want to occupy and have more room. Otherwise, my dreams are pretty ordinary.

    I highly recommend the article cited above. Very fascinating …

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  27. This has been fun reading…

    Our son had night terrors too… definitely worse on the parents than the kid… whew- glad those days are over.

    The house dream some of you mentioned… I’ve had that too; but it’s wandering around a neighbors house and finding all these rooms I didn’t know about.

    And another recurring dream I have is my being chased by ‘The Football Team’ or some other ‘brute squad’ type group… usually it’s premeditated by something I’ve done to them… Hmmm….

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