Dreaming of Elephants

"They" say that it is a good idea to keep a notebook or pad of paper by your bed to write down your dreams when you wake up. I'm not opposed to the idea, but have never actually gone so far as to put it to practice. Over the course of my 33 years on the planet I have had some pretty bizarre dreams (as we all have), but for the most part I forget about them and move on. I did have one dream back in 2005 that was particularly bizarre and has been sitting in my Gmail drafts folder for over three years. I figured I would go ahead and post it here so that I don't have to keep it saved in my email drafts any longer:

I had a dream Sunday night (or Monday morning really) that I was in this huge desert where 192 elephants (yes, there was an exact number for some reason) that had been killed were all lined up. They (they being all these men in uniforms) were going to burn all of them to ash to dispose of the bodies. I was standing there looking at all of the bodies and was so sad and couldn't understand why they were all dead and thought that it was terrible that they were just going to burn all of them up. Then one of the elephants started to stand up and a bunch of guys ran over with rifles and started shooting it in the back of the head until it dropped again. Then another one started standing and they were shooting it and shooting it but it wouldn't die and it grabbed a guy with its trunk and was flinging him around in the air and another guy started shooting it with a machine gun but he was panicking and started spraying bullets everywhere and the bullets all started flying at me and I dove to the ground just in time but could feel the wind as the bullets just barely missed me. Then this African guy rode by on some crazy bicycle type thing that had blades for wheels and chopped up the guy that the elephant had thrown to the ground or so I thought, but then all of the sudden this little circular cage rolled by and the guy was in it in one piece. Then I woke up.

Freud may or may not have had a field day with this one....who knows. I have loved elephants since I was a little kid when my parents used to read me Babar books and I keep four little elephant "statues" or wood carvings in my apartment as personal good luck charms, so perhaps that is part of them being so prominent in the dream. Again, who knows. Maybe it was just a really weird dream with no real meaning to it. Sometimes things are just that simple.