Daniel and I are standing on a hillside looking over at ski chalets along the slopes of Black
Mountain in Jackson. Parked in front of one of them he can see a red car but I am unable to pick it
out. Then I am riding with Daniel down a mountain road lined with boulders. Daniel is driving fast
but stays in control. Then I am riding a small black pony with two other men also on ponies. My
pony is wandering eratically from side to side as if it were a restless dog on a leash. It becomes
an opossum and runs ahead of me on the leash. I run after it and catch up as it is about to eat a
mouse at the base of a maple tree. We are in front of several ramshackle sheds and I see a baby
opossum on the ground between me and the closest shed. Then my opossum again runs ahead, this time
up the wooded hillside to my right. Still on the leash, it darts into a burrow between some roots.
When the opossum doesn't come back out I realize that the leash is probably hung up inside the hole.
A man next to me dives into the hole to retrieve it while I walk a few yards further up the hill to
a rusty piece of corrugated roofing which is lying among the dried leaves on the ground.
Anticipating that I will be able to see down into the hole, I crawl out onto the piece of roofing
and peer into a crack along one edge. The moment I realize that the roofing is not securely
attached, it gives way under me and I fall maybe 15 feet into a room excavated in the ground. The
room is lined with scraps of carpet which pad my fall so I am unhurt, but I will not be able to
escape from the hole.
Actually God is only referenced indirectly in this dream, which is primarily a review of my life in
comparison with Daniel's when I was about his age. Daniel is in charge of his own life, at least to
a much greater extent than I was, and he has a clearer idea of where he is headed than I did that is
age, as indicated in the dream by his ability to see the red car, and by the fact that he is driving
while I am a passenger.
Riding the pony recalls a day of hunting with old Roy from Texas up in Nate Creek back in October
1980. I had been hunting all week, hiking up and down steep ridges covered with Aspen and Spruce
and a few inches of snow, and hadn't gotten the bull elk I was looking for. Someone in Roy's party
had a cow tag and had shot a cow elk and I knew where it was so I took the day off from hunting,
borrowed one of their horses and rode in with them to retrieve it. The image that sticks in my mind
is of me in my cowboy hat and heavy wool pants, carrying my gun and riding a trail through the Aspen
with three other guys. I felt grown-up for a change, one of the guys out hunting, and guiding them
to our elk. But hunting season ended and I returned to town where I didn't know where I was going
and what I wanted to do in life, and how to actually grow up. So I turned to God for guidance and
turned my life over to him, and to Susan.
That relinquishing of the management of my own life is represented in the dream by the pony becoming
like a dog on a leash which takes off where it wants to go, pulling me along behind it. But the dog
is actually an opossum, representing Susan's and my home in Auburn, and by extension Susan herself
whom God told me to marry. The baby opossum recalls the time a real baby opossum turned up in
David's room in Auburn, and thus symbolizes the home and family Susan and I created together. I
think that the mouse which the opossum kills is me. The hole into which the opossum disappears and
into which I subsequently fall represents ALS. My landing there is padded by the carpets,
representing the love Darchelle and I share; we are perennially shopping together for carpets.