On January 9 I dreamed that: I opened the New York Times to see an article on the front page, left column above the fold, about a man who had built a refuge for feral pigs and boars. In the picture he was standing in a farm yard with the boars snuffling around his legs. He said that he had been inspired to save these primal creatures when he realized that they were being largely forgotten in our modern world.
I was amused to see the look on his face. He seemed to have landed in a whole new world - wearing ivy league clothes, a careful haircut and glasses in the midst of the muddy, routing boars.
This dream came while I was writing an entry for our Dreamways dictionary and contemplating "Boar." I visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and came face to face, nose to snout with a few of the boar's relatives. Their wild, routing, stampeding, blood-curdling energy had indeed been lost in my "modern world." And it is my studious, be-spectacled animus who is bringing them back to my attention on the front page of the paper that publishes "All The News That's Fit to Print."
Another association that I have to "boar" is an encounter I had several years ago on a West Texas ranch. I was on the back of the first horse I'd ridden in twenty years, when my cowboy friend warned me to keep the horse quiet as we passed the cage that trapped the feral pigs. I was terrified and the horse knew it. When we finally made our way up the cactus lined path to the narrow spot with the cage, I forced myself to look at the black swarm of squealing pigs - teeth gnashing at the wire, trying for freedom and a taste of my blood. The horse shied but didn't throw me, and I was changed by the waking encounter with creatures who inhabit the realm of nightmare. As with a nightmare, I was awakened to this fearful, forgotten place in myself and the domesticated world in which I live. I was humbled.
This dream, four years after West Texas, indicates that there is now a refuge for these primal animals. They are being integrated and protected in my psychic geography. Their wild, ferocious nature has been consciously faced and can now be allowed to live rather than killed or run from, and incorporated in to the pantheon of wild, instinctual creatures that are aspects of my psyche.