The Norse Gods and their Arizona Ranch

When I woke up there were gaps in what I could recall of the first part of the dream, but enough was left to be of interest.

In the dream my dad and brothers and me were down from our ranch in the Arizona mountains visiting some cousins out Phoenix way. First it was actual cousins, then we were visiting some dream cousins who were gods, which is less odd because we were the Norse gods, supreme among all the gods, and my dad was Odin (my actual real-life dad, he was Odin) and I was his heir, somewhere in the age range of 17 to mid-20s, the dream was a bit wobbly on the specifics.

So these cousins are acting a bit odd, there’s a bit of peculiarity involving something of ours that I can’t remember, and towards the end of our visit we are sitting around on cottonwood logs around the fire and their patriarch announces that they are taking over. They will be the supreme gods now. They have done something or other, or confiscated something or other of Odin’s, that means they have the whip hand now, and my dad observes wryly that that’s why they were doing the peculiar stuff earlier. We are still formidable so the patriarch says he’ll let Odin keep our ranch if we go peaceable and when the patriarch says he’s going to leave us with 15 of [x] (I really wish I could remember what [x] was) I angrily bid him up to 18 or there will be trouble. He isn’t real happy about it but accepts. Odin/my dad just watches.

My brother Thor (not one of my actual brothers–Thor, but in this dream Thor is my brother) is sitting among the cousins over on their side of the fire and my dad observes that it looks like they’ve got it all worked out so that when my dad passes on they can put Thor forward as the heir in my place and claim the ranch. Though, he observes, instead of running the ranch as sole owner Thor will at best be their Chief Minister of Finance. Thor nods and says that’s much better than nothing.

We head back to the ranch. It’s fall. We drive our beat up old pickup up the dirt road to where it ends in a barbed wire and pine branch fence like you see in those parts. We get out and I open the gate. The scenery is pretty vivid in my mind. Our ranch is a big slope up the side of the mountain. Not too steep, but still a goodly slope. The grass is not lush but thicker than desert grass, but now its cropped short and fairly dry given the season. To the right there is a deep wash with juniper and cedar growing along it. My dad says, “well, I guess I better find the shrine.” This had been in the back of my mind as a solution to our problem on the way home. Somewhere on our place is an ancestral shrine which I’ve heard talked about as a source of great power. Freya is in the shrine or connected to it somehow, and though I don’t know where it is, I believe my dad does.

So when he says he needs to find the shrine, I am fully on board. He walks up along the wash just a short ways, maybe 50 yards, and there on this side of the wash is an old blasted dead cedar which breaks into three main dead branches mostly stripped of their bark. There’s a lot of branches and fallen bark and needles caught in the middle and they create a sort of very rough niche. That’s it, that’s the shrine. The only things different than just any random deadfall is a little pocket towards the back of the niche where a number of twigs have been stuck in straight up, plus two or three fist size rocks spread about, and a tiny twig figure of Freya which is little more than an upright twig with a cross twig for arms and a little bark for hair and cape.

My dad adds another twig in with the other twigs in the pocket towards the back and busies himself straightening them up. There is no power at all as far as I can see. I am deeply disappointed.

About this time we hear a holler. Now just below us on the wash there’s a thick line of cedar that you can’t see through, and indeed it even projects out a bit into the pasture near us. But further down next to the gate there are some gaps and we are situated so that when we turn to see the hallo we can see one of my cousins standing next to their beat up old pickup outside our gate. Inside our gate sitting down with his hands still tied behind his back is my youngest brother whom they took hostage but apparently have decided to return based on our quiet return as ordered to our remote ranch.

I go around the thick line of trees to grab my brother. When I do, I see that concealed by those trees close to me are two other cousins and their father the patriarch of their clan. My brother was apparently bait so they could nab me before I was ready for them. The father is particularly quick off the mark. As he leaps up at me from his crouch, his body leans and lengthens out like its assuming a racing posture. I recognize this. It’s something we gods call ‘generative mode.’ When in generative mode, a god’s body will respond to the god’s intentions as expressed through his actions and transform to match those intentions. I jump back quickly and make off away from them parallel to the fence line below us. But this half-transformed patriarch is almost instantly upon me and the only thing I can do to keep him from grabbing me as we tumble over is to wrap my legs around his waist like a vice. In fact, his headlong rush is still carrying him swiftly along and I end up riding him with my legs wrapped around him. We are still headed the same direction, which is down along the fence line towards a little stand of juniper and pine where we have somewhere along the way parked our pickup. I have some idea of getting to it and escaping in it. But along comes running behind me one of my cousins, one of the patriarch’s son. He’s a big, thick-limbed thick-faced fella whose body is just a bit overlarge and crudely shaped, something like a young ice giant or a neanderthal, he’s wearing a brown and gray patchwork coat, and his big old legs are eating up the distance. He is frankly faster than I am, mounted as I am on a half transformed man running on all fours. There’s nothing for it to kick and spur the man I’m riding to hurry along the transformation. He becomes more and more like a donkey and I bray to hurry up the change and he is a donkey and we are gradually pulling away from the cousin who keeps lumbering behind, we speed past the pickup, and then we reach the corner of the pasture and my donkey takes the corner like a race horse and we are now blazing with speed, he is a horse now, the fastest horse in the world, six-legged Sleipnir (six-legged in my dream) and we blaze all along that fence to the back fence and along that and then down along the wash to where my Dad is. While my cousins were all chasing me, he has freed my youngest brother and there he is standing with my youngest brother when I pull up on Sleipnir and dismount and my cousins come huffing back from down near our pickup where they gave up the chase.

“Give us our dad back now,” one of them says menacingly, and Odin my dad laughs and pats Sleipnir and says, “are you sure he wants to?” Sleipnir doesn’t. He is happy being the fastest horse in the world.

“It’s over,” Odin says. “go back to your home.” Baffled, they do.

The end.