I am standing in a small grassy opening near a small stream when I see a Bobcat in the bushes about
10 feet away. It is an attractive animal, mottled yellowish-brown with a ruff of gray and rust
around its neck. The Bobcat snarls and starts stepping towards me. I am concerned but not too
fearful because it only stands about knee-high at the shoulder and I figure I can fend it off if it
attacks me. As it approaches me I realized that it is asking to be petted so I oblige. Then it
complains of being hot so I suggest that it dip in the stream to cool off. It jumps in and
cat-paddles underwater across a small pool then climbs out and stands on its hind legs looking over
a fence along the stream.
I take the Bobcat to a nearby house which is under construction; we stand in the middle of the open
first floor enclosed only by partially framed exterior walls. Three or four dogs at the neighboring
house realize the Bobcat is present and are hostile towards it. I feel apologetic to the bobcat
for putting it in danger and it takes refuge under the center of the floor of the house. While the
dogs, black and tan hounds of some kind, crouch at the far corner of the house and threaten to crawl
under the floor to get out at the Bobcat, Darchelle huddles next to it and attempts to comfort it.
The Bobcat has broken up into several very flat pieces, like placemats, and it is partly lying on
top of a pale-colored dog like a yellow Lab, which is also very flat and is whimpering softly.
Approaching close to the threatening dogs, I throw a few rocks at them in an attempt to drive them
away. One of the dogs tosses one of the rocks back at me but they do not leave until I yell at
them.
Darchelle coaxes the Bobcat to come out to the near corner of the house, but it is still in flat
pieces and does not come all the way out into the open. Three or four boys, also from the
neighboring house, reappear at the far corner of the house where the dogs were and begin throwing
rocks at me. I am perhaps 20 feet from the corner of the house where the Bobcat is and I am
accompanied by an old woman sitting in a chair and covered in a shawl or blanket. She does not move
or speak. The rocks are gray and angular, about the size of my fist, and none of them hit me or the
woman. I become very angry at the boys and I begin to run towards them. someone lifts up a tennis
ball can as if to toss the balls within it in my direction. Four or five golf balls pour out of the
can but do not come near me. When I reach the boys they flee from me and I scream after them, "What
will it take to make you go away? Do I need to let you suck my cock?" In my anger I am thinking of
that action as a sacrifice of myself to them.
A woman dressed in orange is sitting in a chair on the piled-up bare dirt next to the corner of the
house. As I turn away from the boys I notice her and realize that she is associated somehow with
the boys. Nonetheless she reassures me that I was not unreasonable to be angry at the boys and to
speak to them the way I did.
Considering the dream, I initially associated the Bobcat with David, who was visiting us this past weekend. I also associated the seated woman at the
end of the dream with an image of David's mother from a dream of his which he described to us over
the weekend. On further reflection, I recognized the way the Bobcat became friendly when it
approached me - it was the way the dogs in my last God dream suddenly changed when I reached down to pet
them. That would make the Bobcat another symbol of God, perhaps representing the loving Jesus with
whom I often dialogued in prayer during my Christian life.
Given that I have repeatedly used dogs, and sometimes aggressive dogs, to represent God in my dreams
over the past several years, it seems likely that the dogs in this dream also symbolize God.
Perhaps they represent the God (whom I now recognize as a projection of my own attitude towards
myself) who offered me salvation, goodness and love but persistently withheld them because of my own
failure to love him in return. Ultimately I rejected the authority of that God and eliminated him
from my worldview because he threatened me with destruction, but in so doing I also lost my belief
in the imaginary friend whom I had known as Jesus. In my dream the Bobcat was undone by the
threatening dogs. In my life Jesus was undone because he was linked to the threatening God that I
rejected. It took the death sentence of ALS to finally empower me to drive God out of my life.
That anger was, if not justified, then at least not unreasonable according to the woman in the
dream who is herself on the side of God.
At another level, the Bobcat represents me as I was before I encountered God - intrigued by the
world of nature around me but unsure of myself with other people, loving and seeking love - my
little boy as some would put it. That person was undone by God, as represented by the dogs. But
the dogs became the boys, or perhaps young men, who were throwing stones at me. Thus the dream
points out that the condemning God was always only a projection of my own self-condemnation. The
young men are me as well, and just as their rocks did not seem intended to hit me, my condemning
self was not intended to destroy me, but rather to protect me from my own sadness. As I now
understand it, I developed that critical self as a way of keeping a version of my father with me
when I began to grieve losing him after my parents divorced. In this level, the silent woman
represents my mother, unable to help me at that time and the woman in orange who speaks at the end
represents my internal mother, modeled in part on Darchelle's love for me.
The end of the dream represents the integration of formerly separated parts of myself, both my self-
love and my self-hate, in a process which required the destruction of the external objects (which I
identified as God) to which I had assigned them. Repudiating God was a frightening prospect which
for me might not have been possible without the crisis of being diagnosed with a fatal illness. The
anger I felt about the prospect of dying from ALS (the sacrifice of myself) gave me the courage to
dispense with God and to take responsibility for those feelings about myself. Although spoken in
anger, "suck my cock" refers to an act of sexual intimacy and symbolizes taking ownership of my
feelings, which is what it took to make the threatening God go away.