To Dream Amphibial

Last night I had the strangest dream [where everything was exactly how it seemed - sorry, Postal Service stream of consciousness interruption]. I dreamt that, when changing the water in one of my water-bound plants (a cutting that I was attempting to root), I had discovered a multitude of exuberant, tiny tadpoles in my water vase.

Initially, I was very glad to see them, thinking a momma frog must have stopped by overnight and specially chosen my window sill to have her babies. This discovery brought to the fore of my (un)consciousness pleasant, childhood memories of my capturing miniature, spring peeper tadpoles from our backyard creek. (I’ve always been very fond of toads and frogs; because I spent so much time as a child in and out of water myself, I relate to their amphibial nature.)

The dream soon took a fantastic turn. Somehow, I abruptly had a mouth full of tadpoles. It is unclear whether I had absentmindedly taken a drink from the vase of tadpoles*, but once I realized what had happened, I quickly and gingerly tried to spit them all back into the water.  I then anxiously hovered over the vase to see if they had survived the trip to and from my mouth.  The tadpoles seemed to be okay.  Most of them floated at the top for a second (most likely stunned) and then kicked back into action and started swimming quite contentedly with their brethren.

Within moments I felt more tadpoles in my mouth – crammed in between my teeth and gums, in the back of my throat, and under my tongue.  I automatically presumed that I must not have spit them all out before (although, I remember being certain that I had emptied my mouth of tadpoles in the dream - this is not something one easily mistakes: whether one's mouth contains tadpoles or not). At any rate, I again spit my mouth tadpoles into the vase.

At this point, the dream begins to break down; maybe because I was approaching the end of that particular REM cycle or perhaps because I’d forgotten the ending since I awoke (dreams are fleeting, after all). Regardless, I recalled the dream the moment I walked into my shower this morning and felt the water streaming down my body. I’ve since been pondering what this dream could have meant.  If anyone would like to offer up a dream analysis, please feel free to do so.


Om shanti.




*This part of the dream is rather hazy.  However, the depth of my inattentiveness is so profound that I feel this could be a feasible theory.