Vomiting On The Astral Plane

I don't know about you guys, but I have some pretty twisted dreams, pretty frequently. They are normally about me experiencing things that are inconvenient, which probably has something to do with my very low tolerance for bullshit. I often dream about birds though, which as you can imagine is pretty sweet. This is odd to me, since I usually spend significant amounts of time thinking about politics, punk rock, women, my life, women in my life, hating my job, and the vast quantities of whiskey I consume. Yes birds pop into my waking conscious relatively often, but I dont really obsess over them like I used to, and like how many of my colleagues still do.

Most of my dreams confuse the hell out of me, and I try to forget about the really disturbing ones. I have been stalked by a small tornado made of lightning, chased by a small, fast, angry orangutan, shot at by UFOs, attacked by a herd of dinosaurs. They can be pretty epic at times. But most often theyre just weird. I'm going to describe a series of dreams I had last night, and I am going to ask YOU, my loyal reader, to interpret them for me in a comment. Birders and nonbirders alike can do this. Lord knows I dont know what to make of it.

The first thing I remember is being on a boat, which I initially thought was way out to sea. It was a Shearwater Journeys trip (the operator who I went out with out of Monterey), and Debi was yelling about some kind of rare shorebird (Buff-breasted Sandpiper, I think) being on the water, and some other shorebirds flying over. It was at this time I realized we were actually in in San Francisco Bay, and I was looking at the bay bridge. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was actually the Samoa Bridge in Humboldt Bay.

The next thing I know, Im driving down a windy road with Rob Hewitt, my legendary friend and former employer. I think we were somewhere on the Mendocino coast. It was apparently a birding trip, as I pointed out a flock of gulls in a parking lot next to the road and we pulled over to look at them. The gulls were all pretty common species, but then I started noticing some egrets standing amongst them, and what appeared to be young cormorants that had been abandoned by their parents. The egrets and cormorants were extremely sick and on the verge of death, which was confusing and kind of a bummer. I would return to this scene several times throughout the night....at one point I pushed a Snowy Egret with my finger and it keeled over and died. It was a pretty fucked up situation.

Suddenly I was on the side Hwy 101, along the "safety corridor" between Eureka and Arcata, looking at a Loggerhead Shrike. I was pretty stoked, because Ive only seen one in Humboldt before (in real life, this is actually true). But I was searching for something, and had to drive south along some strange series of roads. I got lost, and after asking directions I wound up outside a barn. Some dude was there, and he showed me around. We walked into the barn, which had a second story above the ground floor. I felt something warm and wet land on my lips, and I looked up and realized the second story was full of livestock, and that a goat had just shat onto my mouth. It was really watery and gross. I walked outside and puked, and puked, and puked (which was actually not nearly as unpleasant as it is in reality). After that, I woke up.

What does it all mean? All Im really certain of is that Im glad I threw up that goat shit in my dream, because if I had done much else I probably would have been very disturbed when I woke up. Selah.