Some Russians and a Huge Cougar

Warning: this is a dream.

I had a curious dream about a huge cougar and some Russians.

For this dream to make sense, btw, be aware that my dreams have a curious feature. Even when I’m in the dream myself, sometimes I see the dream from a third-party point of view. It switches back and forth.

So the dream opens with me parking off a forested road up in the hills. There is a short steep slope right in front of me, and as some kind of poorly maintained roadside monument there are a number of very old spaceships or rockets in a rectangular formation going up the side of the slope here. There is an informal parking strip for people who want to poke around this thing, and that is where I am parked.

I have been here before, in my dream. In fact, I believe I’ve dreamed about this place before. But in my dreams from before, I visited here in the summer as a jumping off point for summer backpack camping with my dad and brothers. Now it is the winter. There is snow, not thick. I am backpacking by myself.

The slope is thick with trees and brush. There is no formal trail here. So the way we usually do it is we hike up through the old rockets to a kind of meadow at the top of the slope. There is a creek coming down from the left with an informal trail that’s been beaten there over the years. A few miles back there’s a nice place to camp.  That’s the way we go.

I put on my very bulky backpack, stuffed with winter gear, and then head over to the rockets. They are on a kind of slab with the top layer being something like a thick rubber sheet that is riveted together. Even in the summer its steep and you have to be careful about your footing. Now its tough. I use the rivets as toeholds as I lean forward up the hill.  Thankfully the snow is mostly melted off the pad, which is south-facing.

When I get to the top, I discover the snow is a lot thicker up here. A couple of feet deep and even thicker. I stop to catch my breath and admire the view. From where I am you can see the mountain range off to the left in the distance and the tops of hills all around. In front of me is a gentle ridge or slope and to the left is the opening where the creekbed comes downs.

Suddenly a racket off to my right catches my eye. The second ridge is lower there and the trees sparser. Coming out from the trees in a furious gallop are three riders. There are a number of things that I perceived all at once, so let me set the scene before telling you the one big thing that drew all my attention. The riders were bundled up and had packs on their horses and I had a faint impression/recollection that there was another informal trail off that direction that they must have been coming from. One of the men was older, in his late 40s perhaps, one of the men was younger, and the third rider was a blond woman, possibly also in her early 30s.

But after this momentary flash of impression, what I saw was that blond woman’s horse was bucking furiously because it had an enormous cougar on its back. It was the biggest cougar I have ever seen. It was dark brown and gray and its fur was thicker than you often see. It was huge. It was on the back half of the horse, crouched.  So big its a wonder the horse can hold its weight. There was a momentary impression of the men shouting and waving their arms, the cougar gripping the horse as it bucked, the woman grim-faced and white . . . and then the cougar leapt off and bounded back into the woods. Red streaks of blood down the flanks of the woman’s horse from where the claws had been. Me, my mouth gaping.

All this time I the point of view and I the person are one. Now the riders come trotting over to me and my viewpoint separates out.

The woman is back a bit taking deep breaths and trying to calm her horse. She is still mounted. The younger man is also to the rear watching us. The older man rides up to talk.

We are having a normal trail-met conversation, nothing about the cougar, which in the way of dreams doesn’t seem odd. He asks where I’m headed, I tell him, and so forth.

Abruptly it becomes clear to me (the point of view) that these three are a Russian special operations team who are thinking that I (the person) have blown their mission, in which case they should kill me. I the person am not aware of this yet. I (viewpoint) direct myself (person) to casually not be too keen on the travelers and focus more of my gaze on the trail where I intend to go. There is some more desultory conversation, I (the person) am wondering if I really want to stay out there with that cougar on the loose, and the older man, a colonel, apparently reaches some kind of decision. He draws a handgun on me.

He tells me that he is the leader of a Russian team who are going to destroy the rockets I just passed. I sigh, and my viewpoint returns to my person. He says that there is a big operation going on, lots of simultaneous attacks all at once, his team is the rockets, but of most concern to me is that he thinks I’m a threat to squeal on their rocket sabotage so he will have to kill me. Do I see any alternative, he asks?

I sigh again. Of all the stupid ways to die. The rockets are completely, utterly, 100% inoperable. They are basically sheet metal and a few rusted internal parts. They have been inert on the side of the road since the 1960s and from the looks of them probably had no military value even when new. I am going to die because foreigners want to blow up a shabby, remote roadside attraction.

I start to reason with him. I have a family. They need a father more than the authorities need to be notified that some Russians have destroyed some rockets after the destruction has already happened. What would be the point? I can just continue on my way up the trail and I will be miles and miles from anything. They can disable my vehicle. It’s just right down there. But I can tell none of this is making a difference. The man would like to trust me, but he doesn’t.

So I say, look, I don’t know what your religion is, I guess most of you guys are nominally Russian Orthodox these days. He mutters something inaudible. But, I say, at heart you are still Soviets. The Soviet Union broke you and at heart you are still materialists. You are thinking about this situation like a materialist. Assess the threat, eliminate the threat. That’s how the soviets thought and look how weak they were. They fell. At this point he’s angry.

“Communism was the weakness,” he says. He doesn’t say “not materialism,” but that is the point he’s making.. He’s gesturing and really pretty upset about this. “Capitalism was materialist too and it made you strong.”

I shake my head. “Can you really look at our society and say that we are strong? We became weak just like you, only it took a few decades longer.”

He’s unsettled by this. Then I say, as a tactic– “that was no natural cougar. It was bigger than any cougar has any right to be. You know that. It was a warning and a sign.” I say this as a tactic, but as soon as I say it I realize it is true.

Then the dream ends.