All this week, it’s been about 22 degrees at night. We’ve been keeping our bedroom window open because of the intolerable summer heat. Last night, I had a vivid dream about birds and cats.
I saw that a crow had flown in our window, and was circling over our bed. I said to my wife “there’s a crow in the room” but she didn’t wake up. The crow was silent, but made me feel nervous, and I also didn’t like the idea of a wild animal feeling trapped inside a room. I got up and pushed the window open wide and pulled back the drape. The crow flew out immediately.
Back in bed, I stretched out in relief.
The next image I had was a giant crow the size of a bald eagle, sitting just inside the same window. He was silent and motionless, with grizzled, grey feathers and large dark brown eyes. I just stared at him, and he blinked passively at me. He seemed as old as the hills and impressed me as being very wise.
A moment later, two young cats scampered into the room and jumped up on the bed with their whiskers bright and tails held high. I recognized one as our beloved cat Sylvester, who’d died a difficult death in our livingroom about ten years earlier. He was in his youth, toned and healthy, with a bright pink nose. I snuggled down onto him, heard him purr, and felt his muzzle under my chin as his paws hugged my neck. The other cat was our current cat, Blue, but also in his youth, walking around on the bed wagging his tail happily. It was the most happy and peaceful I’ve felt in a long time.
Crows and domestic cats seem to be always at odds, fighting or threatening each other. Recently, crows had nested in our backyard tree and lit onto our lawn, and gotten close enough to our patio door to intimidate our cat Blue. It was the only time I’d ever seen him with his tail between his legs.
In my neighbourhood of East Vancouver every night around 5pm, we watch hundreds of crows fly east as they migrate to their rookery in Burnaby’s Still Creek area. Those crows (and occasional celebrity crows, like Canuck the Crow) have become East Van symbols.
To me, they are smart animals. Canuck was an example of that, famous for stealing a knife from a crime scene (allegedly) and for befriending a local man named Shawn. I’ve also heard crows or ravens called tricksters in First Nations legends. It doesn’t surprise me that I’d see one as a symbol that represented wisdom and depth.
My wife said that a crow in the house represents that death is on the way. It seems to me like everything means that death is on the way. That speaks to our natural fear of loss. The fact is that death is always on the way for each of us in our own time.
We lost my wife’s father to Covid last year, and a few months ago she lost one of her oldest and dearest friends to cancer. It can be difficult to see anything but loss after you’ve been hurt from losing someone you loved.
For me, each new loss also triggers a memory of a previous loss, particularly of my parents. I’ve now spent more years looking back on them than I ever did living with them, and I find myself continuously constructing, reconstructing, and documenting their memories in order to keep their images alive. Old memories, like frail elders, seem to need regular maintenance and visitations to keep them vital. Still, my mum and dad are well on their way to becoming abstractions.
I really don’t know what it takes to keep people alive. Nothing seems to work for very long. Life is a temporary arrangement, but I don’t want to just focus on the end of things. On this planet, births still outpace deaths by a wide margin, so I might as easily focus on the joy of new life, or on the bliss represented by the curiosity of young kittens, and their unconditional affection and boundless energy.
Dreams are our subconscious mind talking to us through our personal symbolic vocabulary. Maybe the large wise crow was telling me not to worry about losses so much, and to remember that when we lose someone we love, there will often come along someone new to fill the empty space.
I woke up briefly at four am in a cold sweat, and felt a lump by my feet. I turned myself around head-to-toe, and whispered hello to our cat Blue. His toes were twitching in his own dream, but he awoke and said “Merrow!” with his cheery, human-like inflection, and started purring as I kissed his ears and put my arm around him.
