Crows in the Attic

Two days after my last day at work, I had a dream.

In the dream, I was getting ready to go on a trip with a group of people. I had left something behind and went back to where I had been to get it. There I found people literally lying around in beds together. I didn’t belong there anymore. I turned to go. The way out led through the barn. I was walking down the center aisle between the horse stalls toward the barn door when part of the ceiling flapped down right in front of me. I could see clearly through the opening. The attic was bathed in a warm yellow light. There, attached to the inside of the roof, were a number of large bird’s nests with crows in them. Apparently, crows had been nesting there all along! The weather had turned stormy. Looking up the aisle at the large barn door, I couldn’t see anything through the heavy sheet of rain outside. I thought, “I was going to get wet.”

It was a significant dream, one that had meaning for me and that I would remember for a long time. I had become aware of crows right after I returned from India in 1969. They seemed to appear whenever I needed to be reconnected to my higher self.

Aldous Huxley’s Mynah birds in his book, Island would announce, “Attention, attention!” “Here and now!” they would remind people to be in the present and aware about what was happening, a call to consciousness. I had read Island in the early 70’s and heard their call then and many times since. And now, the crows were calling me, this time at the beginning of the last stage of life called elderhood.

The dream was asking me to pause for a moment in the empty space of the barn to consider the journey ahead and remember all the options available now that I was free.

I had recently bought Awakening the Heroes Within, Twelve archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World by Carol Pearson. She is a few years younger than me, I wondered at first if she had enough experience to write about elderhood but quickly put that question aside as I became fully engaged in the archetypes. In describing the call to the quest she explained:

“The call takes different forms for different people. Always the call is to function at a higher or deeper level, to find a way to live that has more significance and depth, to find out who you are beyond the social persona that you and your environment have jointly created.”

There would come a time when a friend who was also a psychiatrist asked me to analyze my dream and I tried, but picking it apart only seemed to destroy its magic. The dream had come from a deeper source where there are no words. People like to say, “It was only a dream” but I have learned that dreams are ways the spirit world communicates with us. The significant ones are truly gifts in our lives.

For me, my dream was an invocation and a reminder that I was not alone, that my spirit would guide me on the next leg of my journey.

Attention! Attention!