08/12/04
The Ostrich In The Ditch, The Ostrich In The Ditch...

I can't recall what came before but I ended up walking out into the living room. It was daytime, light outside but overcast, and I feel it was either late fall or early spring since it was cold and I seemed to be wearing a coat, inside the house. Dad was home but seemed to be busy with something. I went to look out the front window and got a great view of the ditch, as if the big tree in the yard were not even there. In real life the ditch is full of tall weeds and grass but in my dream it just had short grass in it, and it was all matted down, like it had been pressed. In addition the entire yard was full of the same matted-down grass, either dull green or brown. The trees may have been bare and it was dreary outside, cold white light shining in. My view of the ditch was not impeded by the windowframe or anything.

I frowned in puzzlement when I saw what seemed to be some kind of long leg with clawed toes on it, closer to the south (left) end of the ditch. It's like I stepped closer--like I was both inside and outside at once, and had a much better view than I possibly could have. I saw further and further over the rim of the ditch (it was still relatively shallow) until I could make out what was lying there. It was this enormous ostrich corpse, stretched out at full length almost the entire length of the ditch--MUCH bigger than a normal ostrich could be, yet in my dream its size was normal. I stared at this in surprise; I had a dim dream memory of having noticed something down there earlier, yet of having ignored or forgotten about it. Now that I saw it, was I surprised! A dead ostrich?

"Dad!" I called loudly. "Dad, come here! Look at this!"

Dad came into the living room from wherever he had been. He was grousing, "The neighbors might get upset by all this noise you're making!"--which is kind of odd, since the neighbors don't live close enough to get upset by noise in this house; plus it's not like Dad would care anyway. I felt a certain way about this in the dream yet I can't recall what, if I was upset or scoffing or what. I justified my noise by telling myself I had been yelling for a good reason, and he came to look at the dead ostrich with me. We stared at it.

The body was in very bad shape. It was not rotting, as in maggots and putrefaction or anything; it was more like it was simply desiccated, drying out and falling apart like an old book. The leg I had seen was the typical large fleshy leg of an ostrich and it was withered and mummifying, the same as the rest of the body, yet parts of it and the rest were caving in and collapsing and simply blowing away in the cold wind. The ostrich's feathers seemed to be dull grayish like the rest of it, so maybe it was a female, though I didn't receive that impression or even think about what its sex might be; perhaps the feathers were merely dusty. Its long neck stretched out north (to the right), and it's like my eyes traveled up its body to its face; its eyes were missing. There were just little black sockets where they had been, as if they had fallen into its head. I think I remarked that maybe some other kind of bird had pecked them out already.

"It's filling up the whole ditch!" I exclaimed to Dad, then felt like correcting myself, since there was about two feet of space to the left, below its feet. But other than that it stretched the entire length of the thing. "I saw something down there earlier but I didn't say anything about it," I added. "I didn't know what it was."

As I looked at this dead ostrich, I noticed that little things seemed to now be crawling all over it in little streams. I squinted and tried to get a better look, and it's like my eyes zoomed in, like a camera lens. At first I assumed these moving objects were insects swiftly eating the decomposing corpse--like a film of this happening had been sped up--and for a brief moment that's what they were, little insects like ants, traveling in little streaming rows all over the body. But then it's like they weren't there anymore and what I was seeing was simply cracks forming all over the body as it started to fall apart even more, just caving in on itself as if it were hollow and dried out inside; I think the wind even carried little pieces of it away, like dust. I can't emphasize how dry this entire thing was--it would have made a crackling sound as it collapsed. Cracks and fissures formed in it like faultlines opening up cracks in the earth.

Then the wind picked up, and it blew hard and cold--inside the house. And hard little objects started pelting us like hail. I held up my arms to protect myself, cringing at the feeling, and looked down to see what was hitting us. And I saw that it was hundreds of large ants, maybe the size of carpenter ants, either dark red or brown/black in color and with hard shiny bodies which had caused the stinging feeling I'd felt when they'd struck me. The wind had possibly picked them up from somewhere--the ostrich's corpse?--and was now blowing them at us. This seemed normal in the dream, as if the ants themselves were SUPPOSED to be part of a natural storm. They just kept hitting us and falling to the floor; there didn't seem to be any rug or furniture in the way, I just realized. They were landing on the hardwood floor at my feet. I believe I was wearing a coat (not sure if it was mine), as I said, and possibly I was dressed in the rest of my winter clothes as well. These ants were still alive and well when they landed though I don't remember them crawling around.

The weirdest thing by far of this entire dream is that I WAS NOT AFRAID OF THEM. In real life, and in EVERY other ant dream I have ever had, ants scare the hell out of me. Yet here they did not make me cry or wail or freak out or anything. I just stared at them in mild curiosity, and then my instinct was more to just get out of the storm than to flee because they were ants. That is, the windstorm of ants concerned me more than the ants themselves!

I think Dad stayed behind, but I turned and fled toward the bathroom. I have no clue why but of all the rooms in the house, I knew the bathroom would be safe--and indeed it was, for as soon as I ducked inside and shut the door behind me, the wind stopped and it was calm again. The light was on in here; I remember the offwhite of the linoleum floor. In here it was bright and warm, with warm lighting, as opposed to the rest of the house which was lit only by the cold glare from outside and where the rest of the lights seemed to be off. I knew the wind was blowing through the rest of the house (which again was quite normal), yet not in here. I didn't even question why, it just made sense for some reason.

I waited for the ant storm to abate. After a bit I opened the door just slightly (it opens inwards), yet a gust of wind blew in, scattering debris on the floor before I could shut it. I assume some ants came in with it, but all I really remember seeing scattering across the floor was big grains of dirt, loose soil, something like that. It marred the clean floor a bit but I just shut the door and waited a while longer. Again I opened it just a little bit and again I think some wind and dirt and such came in, but then it began to die down. At some point in here the heater had been running, maybe earlier when the storm started, and I think it was still running; I had either sat on it or wanted to, to warm up from the cold. (In real life we have heating vents in our floors and I sometimes sit on the warmest one in the living room to warm up.) The wind began to die down and it was not so cold anymore, so I at last opened the door fully and stepped out into the hall, then into the living room again.

Dad was still here. The ostrich seemed to be forgotten as we now focused on the windstorm itself. "No wonder the heater's been working overtime!" I exclaimed--because the cold ant wind inside the house had forced it to run continuously. Then I almost added, "Though it's a losing battle..."--meaning that with the wind constantly blowing through the house, the heater would just run and run and run and it would NEVER get warm. But I bit my tongue and refrained from saying this last as I felt it might irritate Dad, maybe making us think of the gas bill or something. And that seemed to be right when I woke up, and immediately took lots of notes so I would remember this dream for once!

Real-life associations...when I awoke several times during my sleep, I felt very cold even though the heater was running (it's been in the fifties and sixties here, despite it being August), since the heater in my bedroom is so far away from the furnace as to be virtually useless. At one point my foot was ice cold even though I was fully covered up, and I find this frustrating. :/ Perhaps the cold in real life influenced how cold I felt in the dream. The cold wind blowing through the house, yet seeming "normal," and making the heater run constantly, reminds me vaguely of when we had our windows and siding redone several years ago; this was done in December, so when the windows were removed, cold air got in, and the heater ran more than usual. I remember keeping completely to my bedroom one day while the heater ran and ran and ran, and oddly enough my room was the only warm room in the house; when I noticed that the workmen were gone, I left my room and went out into the living room to see that the front window was missing, just a big gaping hole in the front of the house, and they had not even placed a tarp over it--so here was our house in the middle of December with the big picture window missing and cold air blowing in for several hours while the workmen apparently went out the lunch, and the heater just ran and ran. That incident still mystifies me, why they did not even cover the window up. Also when they were redoing the house, they were instructed to remove the bathroom window, and it was boarded over, so since then our bathroom has had no source of light aside from the electrical one. In real life the bathroom is often the warmest room in the house in the middle of winter. The heater running recently has upset my mother, who does not feel it's cold enough to warrant it running even though it is; it upsets me because it runs up the gas bill, though I am the most sensitive to cold in this house and can't stand things being much below 73 degrees.

I've already mentioned my terror of ants, and they have been on my mind recently as we got some in the house, though it hasn't been bad, and that was not recently compared to this dream. I have no clue why the dream was so dry as it's been raining here a lot and it's been very wet. I have only one association to the ostrich which I can think of, from my childhood, when I visited the circus with my mother and my ONLY memory of the ENTIRE thing is of waiting in a long line and trying to get some blue gummy stuff off of my shoe by holding onto the ostrich cage and rubbing my foot against the hippo cage; I felt a sharp sting in my pinky finger and looked up to see that one of the ostriches had bitten me. Some kids standing nearby laughed, and I pretended to laugh with them, but as soon as I walked away I started crying in both pain and embarrassment. I have absolutely no recall whatsoever of the rest of the circus besides that and that fact still bothers me--why remember an ostrich bite and yet nothing that went on inside the tent??--and since then I have not much cared for ostriches, either. Not that I've had any other occasion to meet with one, close up or otherwise, but I'm fine with that. :P



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