238. In the Mouth of the Wolf, You Will Find It - Amber Tamblyn
Frederic Remington, Moonlight, Wolf (1904)
In Katherine May’s Wintering, she writes, “The wolf is part of our collective psyche. As elemental to our thinking as the sun and the moon… In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to feel whole again.”
Since I was a child, my dreams have been wild playgrounds flush with powerful imagery—imagery that has almost always included wolves or some kind of wilderness that I am either trying to protect myself from or hide away in.
In a journal entry around the age of eight, I wrote about an event in my life, half-understood, half-remembered. It came to me in the form of a recurring dream. I am lying in my parents’ bed trying to sleep when their white wicker pendant lamp that hangs above a desk is turned on to a dim light. Someone who is not supposed to be in the room is coming in or has just left, and though I can’t see them, I can sense their presence.
Wolves begin to howl in the distance outside my parents’ window—a sound which is always protective and comforting in my dreams. The sound has always symbolized a shift taking place, signaling a listening that has begun.
The door to the hallway is halfway open, and I can see the blackness of the living room as I wait for the someone who is there, but not there, to emerge from the shadows. The wolves have gotten closer, and soon they enter the endarkened living room. I can hear their panting and frantic sniffing giving way to snarling and the sounds of someone being attacked—the someone who was perhaps here, in this room—a man, screaming. He cries out something in his own defense, but I cannot make it out. I go down under the blankets to hide and am both terrified and relieved. I feel protected and yet, somehow, preyed upon.
There are records of various versions of this dream in six of my journals, captured in over thirty different entries. At the time, I could not see any significance in their repetition. But as I grew older, I began to see them as breadcrumbs from my intuition—a path my body and my memory were trying to lead me down in order to discover something new about their significance. So I followed.
In Katherine May’s Wintering, she writes, “The wolf is part of our collective psyche. As elemental to our thinking as the sun and the moon… In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to feel whole again.”
- Amber Tamblyn
