Wolves

I said I would follow up my last post with a dream/ story about wolves, and for once I am actually going to write about what I said I would write about (I have been somewhat inconsistent on this front, and the number of loose ends and yet to be explored tangents and thoughts is compiled in a decently sized backlog).

In his post from the other day, Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan, William Tychonievich asks a somewhat rhetorical question, or if not rhetorical, at least one in which he assumed an answer of his readers.  After referencing a book, he gives a quote that has 'wolves' at the start of a list that seems comprised of some random words that are meant to illicit or produce memories or stories of such things as Men sit around the fire at night and talk about them.  Here is WJT's commentary on the list, and the inclusion of 'wolves' in particular:

. . . I also thought it a bit surprising that wolf was the first item on the list, a list of words presumably chosen because they reflect universal experience and would evoke some memory or other in just about everyone. Do you have any tales of wolves to tell, reader? Neither do I. But I suppose things were different in the 13th century, when Invisible Cities is set.

The 'Neither do I' statement of course pre-supposes the answer from a respective reader would be the same as his own - no wolf stories to share.

I do have a wolf story or two, and think more may be on the way at a future point.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, it starts with the earliest dream that I can remember, when I would have been really young. I am not sure how old.  Hard to tell or remember exactly, it was just part of childhood, like I always had it.  It is also the dream that started weighing really heavily on my mind right as things got crazy for me in the fall of 2019.

So, I will summarize the dream, and then write a bit about what it might have to do with anything.

A wolf and a monster

In the dream, I first found myself standing in a strange place.  I looked down, and saw that the ground was purple.  Everything felt very barren like a desert, and the wind was blowing sand around.  But the area where I stood wasn't flat.  Rather, there were rocky hills and cliffs around me.  The hills and cliffs were purple as well, and as I looked up to the sky, it was also purple.  Everything purple, just different shades of it.  And the wind was blowing.

My vision then switched to a lone house that stood in something like a valley, though not entirely a flat one, as there were rolling hills.  I first saw the house from the outside, and there was nothing else around it.  Just empty, purple landscape as far as you could see in any direction.

I was then inside the house, and my point of view was in something like a living room.  Off to my right, there was the front door.  At the foot of the door, there was a boy and a girl and they were laying in something like sleeping bags.  The girl had very dark, long hair, but I did not get a good look at the boy (that I can remember).  

My vision then panned to the left, to where a bedroom was set off of the living room.  In that bedroom, I saw that my dad was lying on a bed that was set in the middle of the room.  Out of his chest protruded an arrow that glowed yellow/ gold - it had some kind of magic about it - and I realized that my dad was dead (or at least thought of him in that way).

Back in the living room, based on the fact that I had just seen my dad lying on the bed, I must have at this time associated myself with the children lying at the foot of the door.  My older sister has long, dark hair, and so I viewed this as her, and then the boy as me.  So, even though I was viewing things from a 3rd person perspective, I inserted myself into the dream as that boy.

As I took in this whole scene, I remember becoming very lonely and very scared.  I understood that my sister and I were sleeping next to the door, with our bodies literally right up against it, in order to keep something out.  Something was coming for us and my dad was dead on the bed unable to help or rescue us.  So my sister and I were all alone against whatever it was that was coming for us.

At this point, there was a brief image of a robed Being who stood outside of the door - just on the other side - and he stood almost as if he were watching over us or seeing us through the door, but it was hard to tell in the dream what that was all about, or what he was doing.

In any case, my vision left the house, and I was back to where I was at the beginning of the dream. However, I began to move very steadily forward, and I was aware that I was moving toward the house.  I could see it in the distance, and I was heading for it.  I became aware that I was seeing things through the eyes of whatever it is that was coming for me, and I was scared.  My vision began to shift between the house itself, and back through the eyes of whatever it was that was coming, and it was getting closer and closer.

Though I never saw whatever it was in the dream, I have always associated it with a wolf.  It is hard to know whether that is because it was, or whether it was influenced by a movie called "The Neverending Story".  In that movie is a fairly good example of the kind of alternating 1st person view I was experiencing in the dream.  In the clip below, starting at about the 2:10 mark you see G'mork, who is a wolf, chasing after Atreyu.  The camera will sometimes be through G'mork's eyes, and sometimes as a 3rd party.  That is basically the alternating effect that was going on in my dream.

So, it is hard to say if I have always associated the monster who was coming to get me and my sister in the dream as being a wolf because of the Neverending Story, or because in the dream it actually was a wolf, but the end result has been the same:  for ~40 years, the dream has been about a wolf drawing closer and closer to a house, with two children inside of it, who I identified as my sister and I.  When I would watch the Neverending Story growing up, this scene would always remind me of my dream.

In my dream, the wolf never made it completely there.  After he was fairly close, my vision again shifted and I was now in a cave, but it seemed that the cave was not necessarily different from the house, in some way.  In that, I didn't feel necessarily (or at least as I would remember it over the years) that I had gone to a different place.  All of a sudden the house was a cave, in some ways.

The cave seemed to have been made by somebody, as its walls were comprised of stones that had been laid on top of each other.  It curved around to the left, and there was some light coming from somewhere around the bend, but where I stood it was dark.  Suddenly, forest animals were running toward me from somewhere down that cave.  They were animated forest animals, like something out of Bambi (again, I am really young having this dream) but they were very scared and were running away from something that was around that bend in the cave, out of sight.

I believe I referenced that movie "Knowing" before (sort of an end of the world apacolypse film).  I went to go see that with my brother-in-law when it came out in theaters.  We were living in San Francisco at the time, and I think my wife and sister had planned something, so we went to go kill some time in the afternoon (this was 2009, so my wife was pregnant with our oldest son - so sans kids at this time).   I didn't like the movie very much, but there is one scene in it where the boy is shown a vision that has a lot of fire, and all sorts of animals are running scared and terrified away from the fire.  When I saw that movie, that scene stood out as something like an adult version how the animals in my dream behaved (of course the animals in the film were on fire, but in my dream they were just running away from something in full panic mode).  At about 1:35 of the clip is the relevant scene, and it only lasts for a few seconds.

So, back to the dream, the animals are running toward me scared of what is behind them.  Looking beyond the animals, I see a shadow now cast on the wall opposite of the bend in the cave, and it is growing larger as the monster (that is how I think of it) is coming closer.  Just as I feel the monster is going to round the corner and come into view, however, I wake up and the dream is over.

Taking stock

So, basically just a normal childhood nightmare, if you really think about it.  If I wasn't sharing it or trying to tie it into other stories, I am not sure it stands out very much.  But, it stuck with me, obviously, for quite a long time, and as you can see from my examples above, I would sometimes see things or experience things that would remind me of scenes in the dream (and potentially even shape how I remembered the dream, of course).

Two strange thing, happened, however, with respect to this dream and the books that Doug had published, as well as then my own dreams and experiences that would follow.

I will start in reverse order, and go with the second thing first.  In October, that childhood dream above had become almost constantly on my mind, and it had brought quite a lot of emotion with it.  Not terror or being afraid, like it would have when I was a kid, but sadness.  Just a lot of sadness around the whole thing.

Perhaps because of that sadness, I had actually associated the dream with events surrounding the sack of Doriath.  For reasons that were confusing to me at the time, rather than associate the girl in my dream sleeping against the door trying to keep the wolf out, I began associating her with the character of Asenath.  In this interpretation, and the emotions I was experiencing at the time, you basically had their betrayal and the resulting tragedy of what happened to her an her family.  Menegroth, in Doriath, where they would have been is a system of 'caves', which explained why I viewed both a house and a cave, with a monster approaching each.  In other words, the house was the cave, which seemed a natural explanation.  Joseph and Asenath were left behind by both sets of parents, and so they were all alone against the evil that was coming to their house.

Further, and this thought would happen later but I am including it here anyway, wolves are sometimes symbolic of betrayal, and that is what I viewed as happening at Doriath.   

As I have mentioned before, we don't have the whole story as to what happened there, and the account that is recounted in Words of Them That Have Slumbered is, in my opinion, a doctored and inaccurate account.  As unbelievable as many of the events in that book seem (just as a lot of the stuff I write about here seem unbelievable), the events at Doriath are conveyed in the type of unbelievable way that comes off as fabricated.  Many things don't make sense.

The connection to Asenath was also likely reinforced by a dream that would end up kicking off the next 8 months of non-stop 'stuff'.  Meaning, my mind was on Asenath and Doriath, not only because of my childhood dream, but also because of this other dream.  I had up to that point, as recounted elsewhere, just had 3 dreams with one word each during the summer of 2019, but nothing had happened since.  On October 13, however, I had a dream that was basically a riddle regarding Asenath.  A man was standing on something like a speaker's platform, and I was part of a group that was listening to him.  He gave the following riddle (recounted as best as I could - I wrote it down immediately after waking up, but also realizing some of the lines may have not been exactly verbatim):

Asenath may be a man-maid of the sea
She may be called of your flesh much redeemed
She may grow old and die due to events and circumstances
But she may BE something else
What is she?

It took me a few years to get to an answer that might make sense, and I have given at least part of that answer here on this blog.

Anyway, so Asenath and her story was already on my mind as I was sort of re-experiencing this childhood dream.

Sometime after that Asenath dream, I reached out to Doug, since things were seeming to shift into something different on my end and I was a bit confused.  I told him about the wolf/ monster dream, as well as the Asenath riddle, I believe, and asked for some of his thoughts.  I hadn't been in regular email contact with him, so he took a few days, and responded by steering me toward the events on Eressea.  This was an interesting insight, and leads me to the second strange thing, which is just how well details of wolves hunting children and monsters coming up from caves in the recounting of Eressea's assault matches with some imagery of my dreams.  I will get into that now, but I do want to note that given what I have thought through since, I am not surprised, in hindsight, that my thinking was steered away from Doriath and to this other story.

On to some of the descriptions of the Numenoreans' invasion of Eressea.   Here is a brief excerpt on the wolves hunting children (from Words of Them That Have Slumbered):

... and these wolves of Thu's [Sauron] whelp sated, and sleeping dreamless lay about fields; and others unwilling to sleep, being aroused more so under the wish of endless night starless, hunted little children, and their pets, dragging bodies to heap up a hill (never forgotten).

In a macabre but still literal way, that is one way to be 'raised by wolves' - children's bodies thrown up into a pile.

The monsters from the caves we actually get from a different account of the assault, and this comes from a future vision, or at least words, Izilba (Eowyn) had of the assault (while communicating through a stone).  This quote actually comes from the earlier book, Words of the Faithful:

Out of the caves, out of the caves, Utumno's mortals,
Out of the ships, out of the ships, out on the shores, glorious she-wolves
Upon the shores bestrewn, bodies of Asenath's maids,
in exile scattered, unseamed, what mothers had sown...

In these lines, you have this notion of monsters (Utumno's mortals) coming out of caves, and wolves landing on shores and hunting children.

So, some pretty clear parallels with at least part of the description of Eressea's invasion with this dream I've had in my head for a fairly long time.  

I want to conclude this dream summary and connection with two additional points, and then I've run out of motivation to talk much more on it, honestly.

First, Eressea itself, or at least half of it, was 'raised by wolves', in the sense that it was sundered in half in order to prevent any additional destruction by the wolves, monsters, and even apparently Nazgul themselves.  One half was raised up and away from these evil Beings, while the other half sunk down below (becoming Eressea #2 in the tale I am exploring here on this blog).

Second, 'raised' if spoken verbally can be interpreted as "razed", which is obviously a much different meaning.  Razed means 'to completely destroy'.  We can accurately say that Eressea #2 was 'razed' by wolves, while Eressea #1 was 'raised' by (meaning as a result of action or agency) wolves.  Even though Ki-Abroam swung the axe, it was the wolves who made the action necessary.

Wild Bill and Raised by Wolves

The dream above, and its potential connection to wolves (both the real and the traitor kind), isn't my only wolf story, though this next thing is more of a brief anecdote that came to my mind when I read WJT's post on Wolves.

I think I've mentioned (but maybe not) that most people who know me call me Bill. In high school, in terms of athletics, one of my nicknames was "Wild Bill".  (Though by my senior year, "Moose" became just as common, for whatever reason)  In college, teammates would also call me that (though at times it morphed into "Crazy Bill" or at times just "Crazy"... they must have had a premonition). 

 Anyway, one of the running jokes or stories in my family has to do with something from my sophomore year in high school.  I was just in a group talking, and somehow the conversation got to parents (maybe someone was complaining about their parents, I can't remember). A teammate named Jason asked something like "Bill, do you even have parents?".

I said "Yeah, of course, why?"


He said "Well, I've always just imagined you living out in the woods being raised by wolves, or something like that".

Anyway, my parents (who I do have) liked to bring up that comment at times.  If I did something dumb, they might say "Well, you were raised by wolves, after all".