We (family?) are sitting in the living room reading by lamplight when half a dozen small gray mice come scurrying towards us from one wall. Several of the mice are each rolling a large red raspberry in front of them; others appear to be each pushing a small dead mouse instead of a raspberry. I quickly get up and start trying to step on the mice with the balls of my bare feet to kill them. I succeed in killing two but the others escape.
I carry the dead mice over to the front door intending to take them outside but one of them is still alive. It has become like a large hairless rat and I call it the Big Daddy mouse as I attempt to kill it by stepping on its head. It requires several tries and when I do succeed in killing it, it bleeds and leaks clear fluid onto the floor. Meanwhile nearby, Mazie seems to be having a big argument with someone, perhaps Jennifer. Daniel might be nearby as well; I'm not sure. I take the daddy rat and the other large mouse out the front door and put them on the front porch then I return inside and use a small blue sponge from the sink to wipe up the blood and fluid off the floor.
Going back out onto the porch I see that the two mice have been taken away but not before the daddy mouse leaked more blood and fluid. I try to wipe up the blood and fluid but the blood has left a dark stain on the floorboards. I notice two little pygmy-owls nearby, each standing only about five inches tall, and I feel a bit disappointed that they are not some other kind of owl. I assume that they are the ones which have taken away the two mice because they are jumping up and down and hooting as if wanting more.
Returning to the living room I see more mice and attempt to step on them but they are too quick for me. Some of them run and hide under some boards in a corner of an empty room off the living room but when I lift up the boards to look for them, I find only cobwebs and dust. In a another part of the empty room pale bugs like cockroaches and spiders but mostly colored white are scuttling through the dust on the floor but there are no mice with them. Returning to the front porch I pick up a decapitated mouse head and offer it to the owls. One of the owls grabs it and hops off the porch step with it but a large blackish rabbit steals the mouse head from the owl. Furious, the owl jumps onto the rabbit's head and claws at its ears with its beak, but to no avail.

The living room, front door and porch are patterned after the house in Jackson, though not exactly the same. The rat which I call Big Daddy, and Mazie's anger, both seem to refer to my father, and by extension, to the internal model of my father which I adopted after the family split up when I was 13. The symbols of the Jackson living room, killing the rat by stepping on it with my bare feet and the clear liquid which seeps out of the dead rat establish a clear connection to my dream of catching a rat several years ago. That dream represented the psychological process I call integration in which I relinquished that critical virtual parent I had internalized as a teenager and subsequently projected onto God. By taking responsibility for my critical view of myself and choosing to let it go, I was able to love and accept myself instead.
The blood from the dead rat suggests a connection to a dream last February which explores in more detail the connection between God and my internal father figure, and my process of letting go of that father figure.
In the earlier dream I discarded the dead rat after putting it in a small stone casket. In this dream I make the dead rat(s) available to two small owls who apparently carry them off and eat them. In my only other dream featuring an owl, the bird represents me and I starve it to death, suggesting that in this dream feeding the owls represents nourishing parts of me, or perhaps my two boys, with my experience of integration and learning to love myself.
That implies that on a larger level, this dream is about the legacy which I leave them after my death. In keeping with that theme, the mouse head which I bring out to them and which is subsequently stolen by the rabbit may represent my physical presence since I have been living with the death sentence of ALS. The rabbit I associate with the bunnies which eat Darchelle's flowers in the front yard. In the dream it may represent Darchelle having me mostly to herself since we've been married, and particularly since we moved into our current home. Worth noting, she really doesn't have all of me because my body is pretty well destroyed by ALS, but she has my mind.
If the owls represent the boys, it would be Daniel who attacks the rabbit, an symbol in part of the difficulties he and Darchelle have experienced in their relationship, but also perhaps an expression of grief and rage at losing his father to death.
I want to return for a moment to my disappointment when I first notice the owls, which I think may express a sense that they could have been more than they are had I been a better father than I was. That said I appreciate and am grateful for who they are, and I recognize that my contribution to who they have become is much less significant than the combined effect of their genetics and other aspects of their environment.
I think in the first part of this dream the mice invading the living room may represent attitudes and beliefs about myself which I received both from my parents and subsequently from the Christianity I accepted in my early 20s. I am represented in that part of the dream perhaps by the raspberries, bowled over and controlled by "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" empowered by the authority of the religion I had accepted as the Truth. Even more significant was my embrace of the idea that through Christianity I could become "good", an ideal which dovetailed neatly with my own inclination to perfectionism. The disappearance of the mice into dusty corners of an empty room aptly symbolizes the irrelevance of those ideas once I accepted responsibility for my own life and acknowledged that my perfectionism was a chimera.