Chronicle of a Dream Foretold

Monday

Some of you know about the mysterious, inexplicable dream I had about Africa. Others don’t, so I will share it.

In June 2006 I woke up in my flat in Sacramento in the middle of the night in one of those sweaty, frightened states.

Thank goodness; it had been but a dream: A giant moth – 12 feet tall – pinned me to a wall. It was flapping its wings and wouldn’t let me get away. I was paralyzed with fear. I squeezed my eyes tight so I wouldn’t have to see it, flapping, flapping. And then I woke up, my heart ready to beat right out of my chest, such was my panic.

A dear friend who knows a lot about dreams, spirit and life talked to me about it. (I’ve been keeping a journal for several years now that records my dreams and some bad poetry that I probably will not subject you to. I wrote about the moth dream in my journal at the time, of course.)

My friend asked me first off, “Did you think the moth was going to kill you?”
I paused to think about her question for what seemed like a minute or two.
“No…. No, I don’t think so. I think it scared me because I don’t like bugs flying at me. And it just kept flapping its wings, and I couldn’t get away.”
“Could you paint a picture of it and look for it?” my friend asked.
It was a distinctive moth – black, with a bit of white around the edges of its wings and with a solitary, iridescent, royal blue dot – one on each wing. I said I could paint it. I got out the watercolors and painted it from memory, then looked on the Internet at all manner of bug sites (ick) for the moth. I saw a lot of butterflies and run-of-the-mill brown spotted moths, but not my royal-blue-dotted moth.

In an off-handed way, I had a flash of insight and shared it with my friend, “Oh, I just thought of something. Maybe the moth had no choice but to pin me to the wall because I was the light, I was the flame, just as every person is. Just a thought.” I laughed it off immediately. “Just a thought.” My friend shook her head no. Her eyes welled with tears.

A year passed. I continued to browse around for the moth’s i.d. but had no luck. And then came the trip to Africa, in July 2007. I was with my intrepid, jovial traveling companion Carol Hanner, the one I mentioned who told her husband when she married him in 2000, “I’ll marry you, but I’m still going on vacations with Maria.” We travel in sync, and our trips all over this planet are our way of exploring cultures and landscapes, as well as catching up with each other’s lives, from the jungles of the Amazon to the snows of the Himalayas. We have a blast, and I am eternally grateful that she is my friend and such an ally on life’s journey. So it was appropriate that Carol was with me that morning in July on a terrace at Notten’s Bush Camp at Sabi Sands Reserve outside Krueger National Park in South Africa.

We were waiting at dawn for our game drive to begin, so we were standing around having coffee. I went over to a table beside a sofa to thumb through some books. There sat the flashy ones I would typically pick up – one about arts/crafts of Africa and one about interior design called “Safari Chic.” But for some reason I opted for the tattered paperback about plants and animals. I flipped it open, turned the page and there it was: my moth! I got chicken skin, as one of my friends calls it. I looked and inspected it again to be sure, but it was obvious. The moth is distinctive, as my painting shows. The book identified it as the blue pansy moth, indigenous only to southern Africa. I read that line over and over again. How could that be? I had never been to this part of Africa. How could I dream of such a moth? I called Carol over. She had heard about the dream long ago. She got goose bumps, too.

And so I was left with a lot of questions that perhaps only Carl Jung could answer if he were alive. Or Laurens van der Post, the late white African scholar, Renaissance man, military officer, chronicler of the Kalahari Bushmen and godfather to Prince Charles. I learned after my trip to Africa that he wrote a book about a similar situation in the 1960s involving a dream that a New York psychotherapist had about a praying mantis. The woman was Manhattan born and bred; she had no idea what a praying mantis was, but by her pleading with van der Post to come to America and talk to her about the repetitive dream, he sailed over to investigate the situation. It led him, inconceivably, to uncover how a Kalahari Bushman had lived and died in New York City in mid-century, a Bushman who loved and danced and laughed despite his having been kidnapped and brought to a foreign land. Van der Post was able then to write the Bushman’s story in a book in the 1970s called, “A Mantis Carol.” The amazing thing is the praying mantis is considered the sacred god of the Kalahari Bushmen, and van der Post felt in some way the dream was planted to make sure the story got told. Nonfiction no less. It’s in Sacramento’s public library. I checked it out after I returned from Africa and heard about it, in astonishment.

Fast forward to March 9, 2008. My main man, Ernest the cab driver, takes Sundays off “to chill,” so without wheels I set off on foot yesterday to buy yet more groceries. (Pfummy is one hungry teenager.) It would be my first walk to the Malapo Crossing shopping center – a long walk in the hot sun, but I needed it. I had been going only 10 minutes or so when something flew toward me, then glided into a thorn tree. I blinked hard in the sunlight.

Could it be?

It zipped out and onto a nearby blade of grass. It was, indeed. The blue pansy moth. Delicate. Elegant. Small, thank heaven. Its blue dot shimmered in a neon glow. I had found it, or it had found me. If it was the dream of the blue pansy moth that had called me to Africa, I had listened. I had arrived.

I smiled the rest of the way to the shopping center as white butterflies and yellow ones danced around me in the air. The blue pansy moth was out of sight but not out of mind.