Dream: Raft Guide Switch

[liveonearth]

In the dream I am minding my own business in my kayak, running the mightly Nolichucky River. We are floating in a calm green pool when one of the guides on the NOC trip that I'm with asks if I want to switch boats for a while. He's bulky like the guide we knew as Monk, but otherwise not familiar. I say OK, and he gets in my kayak, and I get in the back of the raft. Then he is gone with my kayak, don't know where I went.

In the raft I have two customers, looks like a husband and wife. They are friendly enough, and both overweight. The raft has a lot of water in it, which makes it heavy. I am irritated at the guide who gave me a raft full of water and disappeared with my kayak. At the very least he could have emptied the water. There is no bucket to bail it out with.

We float on down and go to shore at the first beach to turn the small raft over and empty out the water, but there is a flowering tree on the beach and small bees buzzing all around. The beach is crawling with them. I am allergic to bees, and so I get in the water and start to gradually swim away from shore, pulling the raft with me. I explain to my customers that I'm allergic, so I won't risk being on that beach. We continue with the raft heavy with water. We are far behind our river trip, and I am unable to move the raft fast enough to keep up or catch up. I am unwilling to whip my two passengers to paddle the water-laden boat to catch up, so we float along looking for another place to empty out.

We find a place to empty where the river takes a sharp right bend around a white granite cliff on the right with buildings on top. Our river trip is now completely out of view. We stop and climb up the granite cliff. There's a hotel on top, and I recognize it. The couple is staying at another hotel about a mile up the road. We check out the displays and look around, then decide to go back to the boat. We can't find the way we came up. We wander along the cliff edge looking for a way down. At one point we got low enough to see where our raft is parked, but we are still high on a cliff and the water at the bottom is obviously too shallow to jump. The couple retreats back to higher ground while I find a way to climb down to the water. Our group is certainly well downstream by now, unless they noticed us missing and stopped to wait.

I wake up.

Sorting the dream now awake:

This dream doesn't have a lot of emotional ooomph behind it except in my feeling that it was a mistake to give up my kayak for a raft. I was talking with an old guiding buddy yesterday (Matt who lives in Ecuador) and describing the last time I actually guided a paddle raft -- on the Salt River two springs ago. I was terribly sore for a week afterward. Paddle raft guiding requires that you sit kind of sideways and twist to steer the boat, and it is not for anyone with a bad back. So I have no desire to guide paddle rafts anymore, even though I did it for 12+ seasons. It is hard to imagine that I did it for so long, and no surprise that it revisited a dream. Guiding is a strenuous form of adult care-taking for a very small paycheck. A raft full of water is an awkward burden, a handicap, a pain in the ass. Kayaking is freedom and independence. Message: hang onto my freedom and independence, and don't trade it out for something I already know I don't want to do anymore.

When a raft is light, a skilled guide can move it along at a pretty good pace without the help of the passengers. But when it is full of water, you can barely move it at all. When I was a guide I always carried a bucket because it is often difficult to find a place where it is safe enough for your customers to get out. Part of my irritation was not having the tool that I wanted.

The couple in the raft I think were dream versions of Bo and Peter, bodacia being a new lj friend whose web site I checked out yesterday.

In the dream I have the usual amount of anxiety about being separated from the group. When running rivers, especially on commercial trips, it is important to stay together. This river was easy and I had no worries about getting my own boat down it, but I didn't want my group to worry. I was also unwilling to force my two passengers to move faster than they normally would, and they were not concerned at all about being separated from the group, so we lagged.

The bees were a real threat to me. I am not the individual who panics when I might get stung, and I have not ever had an anaphylactic reaction, but I have had several general reactions (hives all over) to bees and ants. My doctor friends tell me I do need to be careful, and one set me up with some fresh epi to carry. I also carry benadryl in the summer when there are a lot of bees around. I move slowly and carefully. It is getting to be bee season again, downhill from where I live, at least. There are very few bees in Flagstaff, but I will take the reminder that I need to get out my bee kit and start carrying it.

On the Chattooga River where I worked the most, the yellowjackets would cut out small discs of turkey from the lunch spread, and attempt fly off. Sometimes they would cut too large a disc to fly with. Other times they would just barely be able to get off the ground with their take. Yellow jackets are carnivorous.

The granite cliff with the hotel on top resembled the granite cliff at Canyon Creek where we camped on my most recent Salt River adventure. The granite stone is beautiful, white and rounded and showing signs of the water that shaped it, but on closer observation showing its components of white, gray, black, beige and sometimes pink crystals. Instead of a hotel on top, our camp was on top. Boat were parked at the bottom and we had to hand our gear up and down the cliff, and to climb creatively to get where we were going.

The Nolichucky river didn't look much like itself after the beginning of the dream. The rock in the Noli is metamorphic (schist); dark gray with swirling plasticized bands lighter rock and some areas with low grade jade imbedded. In my dreams all rivers are subject to change into any other rivers....the river itself is the big symbol.....the flow, the way that we get where we are going........the water that we immerse in.........the river to me is spirit, it is power, it is essential to me. This river remained clear, green and warm--a proper summer river in the southeast.

Comments

[neptunia67.livejournal.com]

Your post is broken. I'm pretty sure it's because you put a hyphen in the user tag, which should look like this: xxxxx - different from the lj-cut which does require a hyphen.

I used to get surrounded by what we called "meat bees" when I was butchering. I'm not sure whether they were bees or wasps, but I suspect wasps, although their bodies were more fat, like bees. They are also carnivorous, and swarm when they smell blood. They were always a real pain. Sometimes, in the early hunting season, hunters would bring their kill into the shop and the inside cavity would have several meat bees. They would really slow down after being in the cooler for a couple of days and we would dump them out and put them out in the dumpster. Once they warmed up, they'd fly away. One day, while cleaning out the back of my truck after butchering some pigs, a meat bee stung me in the tender flesh on the back of my arm. OUCH! Between that and having a wasp down the back of my pants while driving, I'm a little paranoid (imagine that!).

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

You commented before I was done working on it! I figured it out.

Down your pants??? Uh uh uh OUCH. Maybe more bees & wasps are carnivores than I had imagined....

I used to get stung regularly when I was a kid. I was not sensitive to them then. I have been told that my new allergies are due to over-exposure to the allergens.....

meat bees

[marijkab.livejournal.com]

The bees were in Dinosaur, too. We used to leave an entire slice of lunch meat out for them, and within 5 minutes, 2 or 3 would have sliced it up and flown away with it. where do they go with meat? I'm guessing it's the salt that they really like. It's just a little odd, however.
Your dream was better than mine- I dreamt about my lower teeth falling out again- yuck.

Re: meat bees

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

OOooooooooh. You have dreamt of your teeth falling out before? This is very strange. What does it mean? Have you tried to work with it? Here's how you do it: write down the dream in present tense and try to catch any emotions in the dream. Then take each part of the dream and free associate with it. Write down all your associations and don't worry if they don't make sense. Then leave it alone for a few days. Then come back and circle any of your free associations that buzz or hum or have energy or power associated with them. Then think about those things for a few days....by then you may begin to understand what the teeth symbolize....

Re: meat bees

[marijkab.livejournal.com]

I've been dreaming of my teeth loosening and getting ready to fall our for the past 4 or 5 years. It started with the conclusion of my last big relationship (you know with who) and they've come up seemingly randomly ever since. It's the most lifelike dream ever, to the point that I wake up and have to feel my teeth to make sure they are all firmly embedded in my gums.

What do you mean, free associations? I'm not good with abstracts.
I'll tell ya one thing, though. These dreams remind me that it's llooooonng past due for a visit to the damn dentist. haha.
Seriously, though, it's a stress thing, and I know it without having to analyze it.

Re: meat bees

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

Free associating just means writing down whatever pops into your head, no matter how banal or simple or gross or far out that it might seem. This tooth dream is trying to tell you something, so it would be a good one to figure out. Esp since it started after your last relationship but hasn't ended with you in this new one. I'll be interested to hear if you still have the dream after you get hitched. I don't think it's about teeth.....completely. Maybe partly. The unconscious mind is very sneaky and tries to say things in dreams, but it speaks a language of symbols. Meanwhile, get you to a dentist for a cleaning and checkup! That might help. I had this dream about my truck and had a hard time getting snow tires for it, but I haven't dreamt that one again since I got new tires....

Re: meat bees

[marijkab.livejournal.com]

Will do with my fancy new health coverage... I wouldn't miss those dreams at all.

Re: meat bees

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

Have you written the dream down yet? Next time you have it (if you do), would you write it down----in the morning if you can, while it's still fresh, and you're still trying to make sure your teeth are still in your head??? Use present tense, it helps.

[bodacia.livejournal.com]

Very interesting dream and dream interpretation.

I'm also scared of bees, and suspect that I may be allergic. My dad had a reaction to a bee sting once. Not sure if it was a full-on anaphalactic reaction, but that's how I remember it from childhood. Of course, knowing him, it could've just been an anxiety attack.

Btw, I'm honored that you would dream about me...but did you have to make me overweight?? ;)

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

I've gotten into dream interp in the last year.....I take it farther later, you guys just get the first stage.

Sorry, I didn't dream you fat because of YOU. Most "rafting customers" are overweight, that's where that part of the dream came from.

Lots of people had anxiety attacks that they confuse with an anaphylactic allergy, because they "can't breathe". Next time you get stung, pay very close attention to your body to see if you really are allergic. If you have a "general" or systemic reaction of any kind, call someone, and take a benadryl, and see what happens. If you really went into anaphylaxis you'd need a fast ride to the hospital. The commonest systemic reaction is hives. If you get stung on your arm, and get hives on your chest, that's a general reaction. Swelling, pain, redness, and itching, etc near the sting doesn't count as general, that's local. What happened the last time you were stung?