Darchelle and I are sitting on a lawn on a little hill in a park with scattered trees, as if we are having a picnic. Looking over at a nearby tree, I see a White-throated Sparrow so I try to imitate its song several times but am not able to whistle a high-enough pitch. The sparrow immediately flies over to me nonetheless and hovers right in front of my face with its partially-open beak forming a little "O" less than an inch in front of the bridge of my nose. I am not afraid; the bird does not seem menacing but rather eager to join or merge with me somehow. I urge Darchelle to take pictures of it because it is quite colorful. It has a long and somewhat frazzled tail, red with white edges, and a blue back. When it flies away I whistle again and it returns and hovers in front of my face just as it did before.
Another bird was present as well, which according to someone nearby was a Violet-green Swallow.
We get up and walk down a gentle hillside past a small rectangular building, perhaps made of brick. In the dried leaves under the eaves at one corner of the building I see the sparrow again, lying in the leaves as if it is dead but I think it is just resting from the effort of responding to my calls.

I am walking on a plowed road back along the hillside which Darchelle and I had descended to the small building but now the hillside is covered with hard smooth snow on which several inches of fresh powder have fallen. Thinking to walk back up the hillside I leave the road but I am wearing only lightweight summer hiking boots which barely grip the slick surface of the snow. When I see that the hillside up ahead gets even steeper, I decided it will be too difficult to climb so I slide back down to the road on my feet accompanied by a small sluff of the fresh snow.
Continuing on the road I pass a small but steep roadcut where the snow has drifted in forming a little cornice. Part of the cornice has already cracked and slid down to the base of the roadcut and several kids are throwing snowballs at the rest of it, trying to get it to slide as well. A little farther down down the road is a another, slightly higher roadcut where the wind-drifted snow has not yet slid down. I wake up wondering if the avalanche I might trigger if I were to walk across the base of the slope would be large enough to bury me.

Although I did not feel much during this dream, when I considered it later it appeared bleak. Keys to my understanding of the dream are the progression from summer/fall into winter, the bird lying in the leaves as if dead and the concluding thoughts of being buried. At the beginning of the dream Darchelle and I are birdwatching, which continues to be our main shared activity although my increasing disability is beginning to threaten to put an end to that. The bird lying in the leaves foreshadows that end, and in the dream precipitates a dramatic change of season into winter. Winter and snow in my dreams often represents the end of my life, a period which according to the dream, I will face death alone.
I associate White-throated Sparrows with home in Jackson, though the bird in the dream bears little resemblance to an actual White-throated Sparrow. Its color, behavior and the shape of its partially-open bill are all vivid details in the dream, suggesting that as symbols they bear significant meaning but what that meaning is, I don't know. On the one hand it is likely that they represent me in some way but on the other hand, the impression is of someone or something trying to reach me, trying to get through to me, trying perhaps to get me to understand or feel something. The association with Jackson may represent the emotional integration I have achieved since recovering from Christianity +; perhaps the dream is suggesting that further integration, possibly in the form of acknowledging and reconciling myself to my approaching death.