Soundtrack in my head: The Cure, “The Caterpillar”
Yesterday, I was riding a crowded bus back to Madison, and feeling some physical discomfort from being unable to stretch out my arms and legs. I commented to the woman next to me how times like this made me wish that I was some kind of shape-shifting entity. To illustrate my point, I crossed my wrists in an X shape over my chest, and in a low, mechanical sounding voice, I said “Let me take the form of a…prairie dog!” The woman laughed and asked why on earth I’d want to be prairie dog, and I replied that they were small and compact, but not so small that they might accidentally get stepped on.
What’s bizarre though is that for some reason last night, I ended up having a creepy dream about prairie dogs. For some reason, I dreamt that one of my housemates was keeping a prairie dog in captivity, and he would keep it subdued by holding it’s head in a firm grip like one would do with a venomous snake to keep it from striking. It did not look comfortable for the prairie dog, and indeed, it’s head looked like it was shaped sort of like a snake when it was being held like that.
Later on in the dream, I tried to clumsily hold the prairie dog’s head that way, too, but it slipped away. I was afraid it was going to turn around and lunge at me, but rather than do so, it just sat there with a ticked off look on his face that gradually turned into a smirk. He just sat there, licking his chops, clearly savoring the look of fear on my face and wanting to get maximum mileage out of it before making his next move.
I woke up, almost with a bit of a start, and for some bizarre reason I was feeling really creeped out. I decided to look up prairie dogs on Google, maybe as a way to make myself feel normal again. I learned that in reality, any prairie dog would be more likely to turn tail and run rather than lunge, for they are very fast animals. I found some other interesting facts, such as that they have many predators, including, of all funny things, ferrets. I knew that they were tunneling animals, but I had not realized that their tunnels could grow so deep. Apparently, in 1900, a tunnel system was found in the high Plains of Texas that was 100 miles wide and 250 miles long, and was home to 400 million prairie dogs.
Any amateur Freuds out there want to interpret this dream for me?
BTW, anyone who has not yet seen “V for Vendetta” should see it on video. The critics tended to downplay this, but the movie has some rather interesting and provocative things to say about the current governments in the U.S. and U.K., the “war on terrorism,” avian flu, and other things.
