Mountain Lions, Again, Still...

I had another mountain lion dream last night.  This one kind of fucked me up.  I woke in the middle of the night in a panic.  For the first time, maybe ever, I wished there was someone here to comfort me. I was upset, it was so real and I was scared.

My cats did their best to calm me down and love on me, which I appreciated.  But what I could have really used was an actual person...and not a smaller version of the beast I just fought off!

This dream was different.  I was walking in the woods alone, I was a teenager.  I saw young cubs and I knew I was in trouble.  I was looking around for mom, and I saw her.  There was nothing I could do but try to hide.  So I tried to do that, but she smelled me and came for me.  She didn’t attack right away.  She just walked around and around and around me.  I was just lying there on the ground, being so still, praying she would just pass by, but then she was on top of me.  I fought back, screaming H E L P over and over again.  And as she tried to bite me, I shoved my hands into her mouth as far back as I could.  This jarred her and she stepped back.  I kept screaming like a maniac. 

Suddenly, there was this man and his son there, and it turned out the lion belonged to them.  They were raising mountain lions and using them as protection for their pot farm.  Now I had survived the mountain lion but had to deal with this shady ass man and his kid.  I talked my way out of it and ran away...I made it back home to my parents’ house but no one was home. I was still scared; thinking the man and the lion might still be coming for me.  I tried to lock the doors but there were no locks.  Then my parents got home and I tried to tell them what happened but I had no marks on me so they didn’t believe me and thought I was just telling tall tales.  Then I went to the grocery store.

Dreams are fucking trippy. Recurring ones about mountain lions are really fucking trippy!

And I will be honest, the mountain lion dreams freak me out.  Why the fuck do I keep dreaming about mountain lions??? It is foreshadowing? Is it a harbinger of what is to come? Do I really love cats this fucking much that they have completely taken over my house and now my psyche?

I put it all into ChatGPT and got some ideas about what this new manifestation of the recurring dream means.  Pretty interesting.  Chat related it all to my fear about the publishing of my memoir that will be out this fall.  And that tracks.  Totally.  Lots of parallels in that...

I am not going to share the ChatGPT stuff, too personal, too much and I still need to process it.  But I am grateful for a place to put all this terror at 3 am when no one is awake and no one is here.  Say what you want about AI, but last night, it was kind of a huge comfort.  I know, I know I sound like a nut case.  "My AI friend really helped me through"but he did. (I don’t know why I got a man robot but I did).

Luckily, I have therapy today so we will unpack this further there.  Until then I am just going to do my best to sit with all the dream brought up and the very unsettled feeling I have about safety, life, mountain lions, men, writing, publishing, the past.  All of it...

Again, still...