# [D3:10M] Vision: [[Father Bear]] Hexagram: [[Third Hexagram]] Trials: [[Third Trial]] Symbols: #dreamer #mountain #bear #blood #father #child #star #snake #mother #baby #rug #daughter #dog #house #car #bodyadrift #head August 27th, 1925, 1986, and 2024 I. The Dreamer of the Unborn rests on a boulder some way up a tall rock formation between the quaking cottonwood below and the entangled rocky mountain pine above. The pine’s snaking roots descend the rock face from which it grows. The dreamer has climbed about halfway up the back of Bear Mountain.  A mourning dove coos nearby.  The first note is low and the second high.  Then two more short syllables of equal pitch sound out, followed by a long trailing coo. The call is represented, in the old language, with this symbol     and admonishes its reader to “be still.” It is often called the Sign of the Mountain. Hearing this, the dreamer abides upon his boulder, holds his breath, and listens. Soon come the lumbering footfalls behind the tangled tree above.  Turning to find the source of the heavy sounds, the Dreamer, cranes his neck and glimpses movement from behind. A dusty brown celerity passes between branches and patches of mutton grass and snakeweed. There is no mistaking the grunt and snort of bear. II. To become a dreamer, and to dream in forgotten languages, one must forget what one thinks one knows of things like politics, philosophy, and religion.  One should listen, instead, for the music of things. Horticultural music. Hydrodynamic music. Heliophilic music.   Failing this, one starts to borrow from the common language of others and, soon, it’s as though one attempts to master another’s script.  One might hear another’s cliché: “Everything is political,” for example.  As if one couldn’t just as readily say: “Anything might be made political.”   How much difference a word makes to the possibility that a thought is true.  “The truth will set you free.” “The truth will make you free.” Two very similar lines, the former more frequently brandished than the latter, and neither, perhaps, very well understood, nor well translated from the Greek.  Two six-word pronouncements with implicitly opposing assumptions about the very nature of freedom and the relative enthusiasm with which it might be met. III. Listen to the Reverberative Laryngeal music from out of the closing distance.  “The possibility of bear will set you free.” “The reality of bear will make you free.” The concept of freedom simplified, made apolitical, enthusiastically real, and universally desired. IV. The pale brown, bloodstained face of bear above the Dreamer of the Unborn appears between branches, a rare variety of Ursidae found uniquely here along the fairways and high stretches of Bear Mountain Wilderness. It is bearded, wild-haired, and struggling with malnutrition and parasites.  Its scientific name is Father Complex.   That is, this dreamer’s father.   That is, the father’s shadow aspect.   That is, the dreamer’s dream father, hearby known as Father Bear.  Father Bear had only recently become hut-less; his trunk-and-branch A-frame was burnt short and black. Believing it was burned down by the spirit of his ex-wife, herself still very much living, Father Bear was frightened into one of his familiar sprintlimped tumble tantrums all down the alluvial folds of Bear Mountain and had been on the run for perhaps a couple of days.  He had the habit of referring to the hut as his church and to himself as its pastor.  He had presided there over a congregation of none. V. Only one night previous—before the present Father Bear Complex now playing out its archetypal scene—had the Dreamer of the Unborn encountered yet another hidden predator. In the cloud-covered darkness of night, a snake had slithered over his foot. He had argued with his wife. Their four-year-old would not sleep, and nor, in times like these, could the husband and wife. The wife had not wanted to sing the child another song and yearned, instead, for a bath.  And so it was that the child screamed at he who was poor at singing.  He was sick and tired of both their feminine melodramas, which seemed a kind of discreet collaboration on their part, and so he sprinted into the night to be with the stars, which weren’t there.  He yelped when he felt the snake and cursed his mother’s spirit, herself still more-or-less living.  She seemed to have tired of haunting his father and had moved onto him. The Dreamer within the Dream sleeps in the spare bedroom tonight.  His sleep is fitful and his dreams anxiously rapid and short.  They are recorded here: VI. Two green monsters with bolts in their necks sit on a couch.  There is distance between them.  Dr. Frankenstein stands obliquely over the couch, just behind the pair. “Come on, now,” he says. “You two were made for each other.” The dead baby on the rug at their feet says what all dead things say: Nothing.    VII. One giant sunflower uses its hand-shaped leaf to hold a middle-aged dad up to the other giant sunflower. They want to play _she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not_. This is revenge for what had happened earlier that morning.  The little dad had picked the flowers’ sunny yellow babies to take home to his little daughter. “Here’s some sunshine dust for you,” he’d said to her. VIII. A dog couple—that is, two romantically involved dogs—are leaving the home of another dog couple, and making way to the car parked on the street.  Mrs. Dog is angry at Mr. Dog. “And then you had to go and leave that on their rug.” He can’t remember a rug.  What was on the rug? IX. A dark room is lit only by the blue light of a 1980’s television set showing early black-and-white cartoons. The Great Mother, on the floor before it, props herself up on an elbow and rubs her head with one hand, while squeezing tight a six-inch-long little bearded bear with the other. “What are you doing to me?” she demands of him, though it appears it’s she who is doing to him. “Showing you,” it says, gasping for air, “the TRUTH!” Between its teeth it asks: “Don’t you like cartoons?” It is trying to help her.  It loves cartoons. X. Two massive mushroom clouds hover in the darkening afternoon.  Houses, cars, telephone lines, Ipads, smartphones, computers, and a bicycle are scattered along the sand dunes below. A lone voice in the air announces: “This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the emergency broadcast system.” All that can be heard in the following silence is a screaming baby.   One last body adrift in space.