In a dream, I’m standing outside near the corner of our house where, in waking reality, the asparagus bed is behind me and the humming bird/butterfly garden is beside me. I’m looking north in the direction of the vegetable garden. I’m unwrapping a large dark-green insect of sorts, the tiny feet of which I’m eating, one, two, three pieces, delicate, luminous and delicious. I know it’s odd and I should be disgusted, but I can’t be because these tiny treats dissolve in my mouth in a similar fashion to our waking reality wine berries. But then I notice the insect is still alive and it’s large; daunting. I decide to step back and let it escape; it’s not harmed, and I don’t want it turning on me. I’ve enjoyed enough of these mysterious little treats, time to let it go and get on with its insect life.
I notice then that our property is bursting with even more life than usual, and the color of the grass and trees is as deep as in waking reality but more luminous. 
I see a small bird or two and butterflies before I notice a really large feathered creature sitting in the somewhat tall grass just a few feet away from me. An owl? No, a hawk! Horus! I’m thrilled to watch this bird that means so much to me spiritually casually feeding, without fear, in front of me. I assume it must be attending to some tiny creature it’s caught. Then I see the huge, bright green and gold-trimmed cobra to the right of the hawk. It’s magnificent, and although I can only see its distinct hood and the top part of its “body” it’s obviously longer than I am tall; monstrous. I realize this snake is the hawk’s target as it attacks it, but the snake fights back. This is all happening a mere foot or two away from me, a glorious, horrifying battle.
At first the hawk seems unstoppable, but then the snake takes the upper hand in the struggle and I take a step back, then another one, and another one, enthralled and yet thinking I really shouldn’t be standing so close to this awesome, deadly serpent. I back away slowly and then run around the corner of the house, intending to continue watching the battle from the safety of the rec room bay windows, where I will have a clear view. But once I’m inside the angle of the sun or something makes the lighting such that all I can distinguish is silhouettes of the bird and the serpent. Thankfully, the hawk has taken the upper hand again.
I should be filming this! I run into my study, grab my video camera, turn it on as I run back into the rec room, switch it to the red camera setting and begin shooting. Unfortunately, someone has called the police and all I get on film is the aftermath of the epic battle. The snake, still alive but wounded, is carried east wrapped in cloth. Meanwhile, a woman in a dark, official uniform of sorts holds out her right arm and calls the hawk to her. The bird alights obediently on her wrist like a trained falcon. She quickly heads north with it and at the edge of the trees releases it, sending it soaring over the forest and back up into the sky. I’m impressed a modern emergency response individual has been trained in falconry. I have all this on film but I missed out on capturing the battle. I’m glad Horus is unharmed but a little concerned and annoyed (who the hell called the authorities?) he wasn’t able to finish off the serpent.
Dream Notes:
The beginning of the dream seems to relate to sustainability, to not feeling guilty about being an omnivore even while respecting the need for moderation, the delicious insect representing the earth and all its resources. The bulk of the dream has to do, I feel, with an ailing friend whose physical body is struggling fiercely to preserve itself, at war with his spirit. Stubbornly, this person longs for the return of earthly comforts and pleasures but he has lost his appetite; his body is slowly but inexorably shutting down. The snake/body was wrapped up in blankets, not dead but not completely alive anymore either, merely existing. The emergency response people are the doctors keeping him alive. The woman who took hold of the hawk and urged it up into the sky is how I feel about it all–that death is a joyous freedom and hell is lingering in an ailing, pleasureless body. There should not be this terrible struggle. We should be able to die with as little fear as we fall asleep to dream every night. That’s the ideal, and the sweetest side effect of spiritual development.
In the dream I was on the side of the falcon, of Horus, of the soul, even while the beauty and power of the serpent was also awe-inspiring. It’s not easy leaving behind our physical vehicle, I’m not so foolish as to imagine it’s not a battle, but it should be a beautiful, majestic, mystical struggle in which there is no doubt Horus will triumph because he and Wadjet (the serpent) are two sides (eternal energy and the forms it assumes) of a conscious creative power, which is why a bird and a serpent appear side-by-side on Pharaoh’s forehead. I was disappointed that all I captured on film was a black-and-white struggle and the “paramedics” because in our society there are only secular institutions, like machine shops, where old bodies/cars go when they no longer run properly, and no real care goes into the transition from this dimension of being into another. There is no priestess to urge the soul to take flight without fear that the spirit world has nothing to do with life as we know it. But in reality, Horus and Isis, spirit and form, hawk and serpent, are united on the Other Side, which we escape to every night in dreams. Ideally, dying should be a conscious transition into lucid dreams, the ultimate WILD.*
The rest of my life is devoted to becoming as that woman who called the hawk to her, walked it to the edge of the forest of this side of being, and launched it up into the sky and the ultimate spiritual-sensual freedom, for which I’ve already begun practicing in my lucid dreams, to the benefit of my waking reality–the magical moment when I saw the hawk and the serpent sitting side by side in the grass of my yard, of my life.
*Wake Initiated Lucid Dream