I dreamt that I was in a canyon surrounded by dark mountains,

Welcome to my dream interpretation studio, where your scenes & symbols can reveal a higher source's view of you & your life & develop your wisdom. Big dream! Let's start with separating into main sections.

First is the Ominous mountains, giant bat attack, and burning town.

Then this dire warfare turns through the smaller & larger bats' opposition to each other into your triumph over them both.

Then your masterful view from the mountain top reduces the bats to much smaller than you are. This is a complete episode by itself.

Thank you for the background information. I'm sure it will help out a lot. I will continue with a summary of the dream's events, though this is more for my own focusing than for yours. When dealing with a long dream, this sort of segmenting helps me bring parts together that might be separated by a long piece of concent. I'm totally convinced that the precise details are often keys to meanings that go beyond what the dreamer already knows to Point Toward what the dream wants us to explore and even move forward toward in our lives.

Second Major section. Are you looking out to sea, with the echoes of the previous scene's mountains now situated as in a Norwegian Fjord? To your right, perhaps as a previously known condition of your life (you custody battle, perhaps), with your cold, fresh bare feet (awakened/refreshed soul(s)) in the present, and the white bird (neither dove nor seagull, but perhaps a little of both?) occupied with its daily food needs, and beginning to move forward in its own life according to migration patterns that--will become your own necessity in the near future, your own migration, leading leftward toward a future your aren't sure of yet, because it's not contained in your past.

And key symbols for this migration are live krill and dead fish. Demanding a choice between what is less familiar and not normally expected to nourish us humans and what we're used to that is universally Dead. What two categories of material sustenance (including food, work, money at least) must you be choosing between during your upcoming migration?

Why does your dream-ego-consciousness notice that you can't smell anything? given that the dead fish "should" be assaulting your nostrils while they're bouncing against your feet? I'd guess one answer is that you will not have to "hold your nose and just do" what would normally make you recoil in disgust, because your higher motivation, born of your 1.5 years of increasingly single-minded struggle, is not dismayed by issues and sacrifices of what would be more pleasant, since your momentum (running) is unstoppable anyway.

Your trajectory is still identical with the bird that symbolizes the spirit of your quest with simplicity that matches your skin-communion with the cold, fresh and pure water.

And now the final scene: You alone, spinning in the water. Now "spinning" surprises me. How is your experience of Spinning in complete contentment different from Swimming like a human? or Swimming like a fish? [And I forgot to ask before: How are Krill different from fish? What do you know about Krill? I now take Krill oil instead of Fish oil for brain food because it might control my LDL cholesterol much better than the statin drug that wasted away 15 lbs of my muscle. But to suddenly begin to prefer Krill oil to Fish oil for my health care seems a very new distinction for it to show up so prominently in your dream-migration. You're way ahead of my knowledge in that arena.

You're free, alone, self-sufficient. How does that fit with walking away from the city where you grew up and theman you love (now?) lives?

Now your spinning appears to become one with the rush of a stream, effortless because the gravity of the stream does it all. So release from effort (which was present in sections 1 & 2) carries the consequence of going where the waterflow goes. and your geographical imagination "knows" that a waterfall is a natural outcome. A sudden transition, normally fraught with peril, because you can't estimate the effect of the falls on your body with your mind; you can't know the results until you take the plunge.

And your conscious ego hasn't plunged into your choice yet, so you're standing on the rock you've found by reaching toward your unconscious future,

Then you say "looked out towards me," which I don't understand. Can you clarify that?

An albatross? What's the difference in your imagination between an albatross and a seagull? or a white dove? What are the positive and negative reactions you have to an albatross?

You did not look down and never saw the waterfall. So your dream is NOT pushing you up against the frightening choices your conscious awareness expects to face. Perhaps the dream's advising you to look more into where you've come in scene 1 & 2 and less toward the looming decision that you think you still face.

Perhaps by studying your dream's distinction between krill and fish you'll gain more in preparation for your next steps.

Yes, that's why the first episode was a completely completed story. It's "merely" a colorful natural dramatic representation of what happened. [But I'd add that even the choice of all the symbols used in that dream-drama must reflect the higher-self-dream-maker's artistic wisdom in presenting the story you already know in the precise way it was presented. Choosing bats, canyon/caverns and fire are colorful and entertaining, but also potentially insight-generating when you compare the lead human characters to giant bats--since bats are mammals too, even though we fear them for their mastery of the night vs ours of the day. I don't have any novel insight yet, but I might later.

But what do you associate with an albatross? Is any part of that the meaning of the famous albatross in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

i'm gettingtired, and I need to get more dinner. But I'll talk more tomorrow if you want to. Looking into the distance is more soothing than looking down. And perhaps if you think about your upcoming move as a migration with an instinctual pattern that your conscious mind doesn't know yet, and you focus in on the contrastbetween live krill and dead fish, you'll begin to find out how to follow your self-nourishment instincts toward how you need to proceed, if not yet where your target city must be.

I also want to mention that I have been scientifically involved with a generic drug, low dose naltrexone, that was pioneered as a treatment for autism. You can find my published medical research review article for free online by looking up Norman Brown, low dose naltrexone, and autoimmune disease. My coauthor, Jaak Panksepp discovered the role of endorphins in infant attachment to mother in the late 1970s and first published on "LDN" for autism in 1988. Dr. Jacqueline McCandless has developed a creme with lowdosenaltrexone in it to rub onto the skin of autistic children. Naltrexone makes our endorphine system more powerful and prevents inflammation from autoimmune diseases, and it's dirt cheap because it's long off patent (so big pharma won't study it). Some autistic people become more related to other people with regular use of LDN, because their endorphin systems reward them more from social contact than they would otherwise. Everybody who takes LDN gradually gets more happy from whatever makes them happy, because that's what the endorphin system is for--tho it also right-regulates the immune system.

Of course there will be plenty of controversy among doctors about using low dose naltrexone, as a creme or capsule, for autism, because conclusive research will be very slow in coming, due to the extreme resistance of the pharmaceutical industry to letting their massive profits (in autoimmune diseases like arthritis & MS!) be wiped out by such a cheap generic alternative.

I wonder if the albatross that has to choose krill over dead fish could be a symbolic reference to your son, who might need to exercise very strict judgment over what he takes into his body? Perhaps you could look up autism & fish, and autism & krill oil. Perhaps your dream guidance is more wonderfully precise than usual, because you have earned the targeted scientific insight thru all of your fiercely determined struggle.

Let's take a look at this a little tomorrow. Good night.

I'm sorry I missed your paragraph about the external constraints around which city you choose to live in. Perhaps you don't look down at the consequences of the waterfall, because you don't expect to HAVE any real choice about where you will live. And your instinctual migration habits are already more or less fixed by the presence of family members who will support you as a single mother raising her special-needs child. There's a lot of positive perspectives on autism, and I assume NY state is as forward-looking as any state in that regard.

Aspergers was codiagnosed for one of the many brilliant autism-spectrum engineering students (collectively known ad "ADD") I got to know at my prior aviation technical university (where they fired me in 2010 after 23 years for trying to start an "inventors learning community" novel educational program to foster those brilliant, polygifted, but "underperforming" students).

Perhaps your son could develop an online mentorship relationship with a scientist somewhere who is studying krill, sharks or whales, so that a strengthening part of his self-image could be based on reading, studying and collaborating in increasingly sophisticated ways with an actual contributor to these fields. In the "accelerated discovery hyperfocused drive" (adhd) of these young people lies much of the hope on the horizon for our overstressed and underappreciated planet, for they want to discover and invent our way out of the worsening crisis that our nationalistic, ethnocentric, classist and humancentered greed and short-sightedness has driven us into. Your son will join a genetically crisis-selected segment of people whose calling it is to save our planet. The sons and daughters I saw in college are those whose elders have kept their sights on the higher goals that light their youthful lights as well as helped them deal with the shortcomings of educational systems not designed for explorers and pioneers.

PS. I called my initiative "learning community" because I already discovered from brainstorming with these young engineers (and others who'd dropped out of engineering because they couldn't stand the regimentation) that we educators would have to learn from them how to configure their programs as much as they would (traditionally) learn from us what they were "sposed to know." And in my role as specialist/psychotherapist educator, I often have to learn from a new client what will work for him or her, because every person is a brand new unopened book.