Cowboy Clairvoyant is a members-only newsletter and series by Autumn Fourkiller featuring dream interpretation, tarot answers, and more ventures into the Beyond. Today, Cowboy Clairvoyant interprets dreams about snakes, owls, and exes.
Dear Dreamers,
Howdy, and welcome (or welcome back). Each time I have sat down to write this introduction this week I have found myself bereft of what to discuss. I haven’t had a bad week, actually, far from it, I’ve read a lot, talked to multiple friends on the phone, and had a lot of exciting writing thoughts. I’ve been thinking about fishing and about gender and about the possibilities of love. I did two private in-depth readings, one planned and one impromptu, and felt good about what the seekers left with. I’ve decided to switch to an old timey alarm clock instead of using my phone, and I met a new friend, a writer also from Oklahoma, for delicious vegan donuts, pretty good soy milk iced vanilla lattes, and just mid non-vegan breakfast sandwiches.
We talked about her brief pit stop in Oklahoma, this state we both love and hate and are tied to for a myriad of reasons, and our resistance to dating anyone exactly our age, and what the future holds for both of us. Then, I came home and sat in the backyard talking to my friend Sean in a shirt Stef Rubino sent me, reading to her from what I was reading, but mostly listening, basking in that comfort you only can when you know each other so well. Thank God I will never be the person I was at 22 again, I told her recently, and she said no seriously, me too. I could feel us both thinking about ourselves and the other at that age, and I, at least, mentally shuddered.
Well, I finally said, I’d do it all again just to meet you. And I would.
Yours in Just One of Those Weeks,
Cowboy
I’m napping on my couch and wake to a white owl at my feet. It’s eating purple berries and then my cat also wants the purple berries so they’re play fighting for them. I clap my hands and tell them to stop because I know the owl could hurt my cat, in the dream I see its claws vividly, but it’s not an attack more like if it’s two normal cats play fighting. They stop, the purple juice from the berries goes on my couch and starts fizzing or bubbling. Like it’s a chemical reaction. Then I run with my girlfriend who just appears out of nowhere to clean the purple juice before it stains my couch. The stain is gone. The owl and my cat go away. I wake up. I had a dream about a white owl 2 weeks ago, but I can’t remember the details, only that I saw the owl from a distance.
– Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
Thank you for the gift of your dream. I won’t lie to you here, culturally (for me), owls are a well… bad omen. Or they can be. Really what they are is a powerful omen. But, of course, what owls mean to me and what owls mean to you are two totally different things, something we must take into consideration before we dive into your dream whole cloth.
First of all, I do not see any ruin in your future, and I think I can provide more clarity to this dream, for this dream is telling you something, so don’t fret. In this dream inside of a dream, we are presented with a stunning image of wildness vs. domesticity in your cat vs. the owl, though they aren’t so much fighting as they are sparring, as they are playing. This is important to remember. You are more worried than your cat is, and your anxiety colors how you perceive what is happening. Just because there is “conflict” does not mean that it needs to be smoothed over. Then, suddenly, the thing they were “fighting” over is gone, leaving only a stain, one that is quickly cleaned up by someone you love.
Well, what does all this mean for you? Even if you had not told me that you wanted to seek a new job in a new sector, and that the anxiety regarding your current job keeps you awake at night, I would have pointed you in this direction, or at least near it. You fear the conflict that leaving your current employment will bring, but you cannot stand the anxiety that it is giving to you day after day. You are at war with smoothing things over or bringing out your claws, but what the cat and the owl tell you, here, is that it will be better once it is over. That the stain left by your decision is easily cleaned up, and that you must be sure to allow the ones closest to you to aid in this, in the cleansing, and also holding you while you do so.
I think the important lesson here for all of us to remember is that of impermanence. While a decision may feel life changing, there is always a more manageable bridge for us to cross, even if the current is fast underneath us. Your next choice of employment can be wholly temporary, just enough to hold you up as you take a breath, regain your strength, and look for a choice you can live with.
See you on the Other Side,
CC
I’m in Prague at a hotel bar. My ex is there but they are drinking and partying with their new girlfriend and friends somewhere else in the hotel. My Ex’s brother sits next to me and asks me to go home with him. I say no (I’m a lesbian in my dreams, too) and he says that I should at least let him walk me back to wherever I’m staying. I say I’m staying at this hotel, he tells me that actually, I’m not. He walks me back over the Prague cobblestone and we talk like we’ve known each other for years, we run from the police for some reason, and I wake up before we make it back to my hostel.
– Acadia
Dear Acadia,
Thank you for the gift of your dream. What a strong opening, in Prague at a hotel bar. I can picture it. Before we begin in earnest, though, I’d like us to introduce some powerful context regarding this dream, to orient us all. The facts: you don’t like your ex’s brother, and you had this dream the night your ex hard launched their new girlfriend.
And yet, despite this dislike, you let him walk you back to the hotel, wherein he upturns your plans once again, but this time, delightfully. You walk and talk like you’ve known each other for years, get into a wildly ’50s sounding run from the police, still together, and then you wake. A simple enough dream, were it not for the facts.
In your questions to me, you asked: Is this dream about my ex or about their brother? To which I can say, quite decidedly, that it is truly about your ex. Your ex’s brother, here, is simply a stand-in for a person you had a long and intimate relationship with. Your ex, and their new lover, are present here, but you can no longer access them, they are as removed from you as any other guest in the hotel. So, the brother then, taking their place, but he can never really be them. I do not mean to suggest that this dream means you are still hung up on your ex, but rather that the ending of this dream means that while you still have some work to do regarding your hurts there, and while it may take longer for you to “move on,” that you will, and it will feel as though you were always meant to, eventually.
We all must sit with one of the worst feelings to experience, which is that of rejection. Think of this rejection not as a rejection of you and who you are, but rather a gift in disguise — better to know now than never, and better to seek out someone who can hold all that you are than someone who cannot.
See you on the Other Side,
CC
Standing in a dark, foggy field, I recognize it as my old home in rural California. I’m holding my cat, Winnie, and set her down in the dark. She reacts, crying, and I pick her up to find she’s been bitten by something on her belly. My mom and stepdad are standing in the dark with us. I flash a light on the ground and see cobras coiled up every five feet, they cover the earth as far as my light can touch. I see their hoods. I feel a bite on my ankle and a cobra bites me. I show my mom Winnie’s bite, I ask her to look, why are we here? We’ve been bitten. But she throws her hands up, defensive, like she can’t acknowledge the harm. We step into my mom and stepdad’s “house,” atmospherically the opposite. White floors, bright sterile lighting. The floor is clear except for the occasional smashed bodies of cobras. I sense that they keep the house cobra free by smashing them to death.
– juji
Dear juji,
Thank you for the gift of your dream. And what a dream it is! You and I have rurality in common, and I, too, have had many dreams set in a dark, foggy field, so I can picture this easily. Among being one of those weeks, this week’s set of dreams is also one of omens — for snake dreams, in Cherokee and Yuchi cosmology, are deep and powerful omens, especially if one is bitten.
The bites are what drew me in at first, as I knew I had something to tell you about them, but also the imagery, you and Winnie and your mom and stepdad in the dark, and yet you and Winnie being, seemingly, the only two creatures who are vulnerable to a field of snakes.
A brief aside here, though I know what snakes mean symbolically, I have no biological basis on which to assert if there are even any cobras Indigenous to California or not, nor if there were if they would be “deadly,” so I had to figure that out before I could really let this dream simmer. Spoiler alert: There aren’t, though there was, apparently, a Los Angeles Cobras football team that played a grand total of one season in the ’80s. Curiosity settled, and now that I knew I could evaluate this dream on purely a spiritual/psychological/etc. basis, things took on an immediate clarity.
So, both you and your beloved Winnie are bitten, and yet your mother, whose field this is, cannot even tend to your hurts, indeed, she thinks, what can I do about it? You are the one who stepped into a field of snakes. This speaks to a trend, I’m sure, in your waking life. You express to your mother a hurt, and she immediately takes it personally. I’m sure there are many among us who feel this way, our mothers on the defensive when it comes to our thoughts and feelings, and I wish there was an easy way around this, a quick fix, but it is dirty work. Much like smashing cobras to death to keep a house that is, in the waking world, the complete opposite of “clean.” I think your senses here are correct, dear juji, and I think you know, too, that the cobras here are emotions. Emotions that you would rather not have. Emotions you feel would disrupt your sense of the “domestic” symbolized here by Winnie, and that your mother, too, wishes you wouldn’t have.
But, as we all should be told once in our lives, we were not put on this earth to “be easy” (Southern speak for behaving, being relaxed, going with the family flow). The only way to, metaphorically, suck the poison out of our wounds is to acknowledge those hurts, those emotions. Hold the wounds up to the light, and to the light of others, even if they flinch away. Yes, the bite may leave a scar, and yet you are capable of carrying on, even “marred.”
See you on the Other Side,
CC
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this is random but there is often fog in my dreams!!!! what it mean