The Terrains of Fear
I had a dream about a cow caught in a tornado, a hamster in a rat maze, and a rhesus monkey loping across concrete covered in shattered glass.
Dreams, you may be thinking, you had dreams, but no, it was one dream, looped together by a deep sense of anxiety, cows hamsters and monkeys suddenly spun out of their element.
The three aspects of the dream are linked by generic fear, but the inhabitants of the dream, the cow hamster and monkey, are playing out their fear on terrain alien to their natural fear habitat and alien to each other’s fear terrain in the dream.
The cow hamster and monkey are, of course, unaware of each other’s fear terrain. Only the dreamer has the scope of awareness to encompass all three, an awareness that turns dream into nightmare.
