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Tigger, Trapped In Ice


This is more of a dream image than a dream. It's very, very old, perhaps from around the same time period as "The Blue Room," and it gave me the same feelings of dread and terror.

In real life long ago my favorite "bed toy" (a stuffed animal I slept with) was Tigger, a little toy tiger of mine. He was not actually the Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh stories; he was just a generic little tiger. For a time I even renamed him "Daniel" after Daniel the Tiger on Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood, until my parents reminded me his name was really Tigger. Then Tigger he again was. I loved him so much that his soft, fluffy fur became matted and dry, his little red nose fell off, and his threaded whiskers pulled out. My dad sewed on a new nose with black thread and threaded through new whiskers to repair him. I've had him for so long that I can only know that he used to be soft and bright orange and fluffy by looking at old pictures of him; in my memory he has always been dullish yellow and matted! But still I love him. :)

That's just some background to help understand the anxiety I felt in this dream. In it, all I can really recall is going outside onto the pavement. There's this one pothole area where the pavement ends in a curve and water occasionally collects, and in my dream a thick layer of ice had formed over all of this. So it must have been winter. I feel an older female relative was with me, maybe back on the porch or just coming out--for some reason I think of either my mother or my aunt Carol (her sister). Not sure why I think of this particular relative. *shrug* I went walking over toward this thicker patch of ice near the pothole area and peered down at it.

Here, the ice was sloping in parts and slightly transparent, so I could see through it. And...beneath the ice, I saw...Tigger. My little toy tiger! He looked to be just beneath the surface--yet he was frozen solid into the ice, just beyond my reach and staring right up at me, and though his face MUST have looked as it always does, just a little toy tiger face, I got this HIDEOUS feeling of fear, as if he were begging to be let free from there. What was even worse than me finding him trapped there was the fact that I had no idea how he had ended up there in the first place. It had taken TIME for that ice to form, but I hadn't seen him lying there before! I couldn't even remember leaving him!

Staring down at this little mute frozen toy tiger under the ice, I just started screaming and screaming...and that's all that I can remember.



Early Dreams
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