In last night's dream, I was visiting my parents in one of their old houses in Nebraska. When I was on the front porch getting ready to go inside, I glanced over into the neighbor's yard and saw a metal sign on a post. It was roughly the same size as a handicapped parking sign. The sign said something like CAUTION: MAY BE BEARS at the top. Under that was a drawing of a grizzly's head, roaring, with one tear rolling down its face. At the bottom, the sign said something like ELDERLY 2 EDITHS in black letters on yellow.
I asked my mom about the sign, and she informed me that their old-lady neighbor and her roommate had acquired a bear for their house. Well, this is clearly a horrible idea, so I asked why in the world she would do that. Turns out the bear was going to help them keep their freezer defrosted. "What the crap can the bear do?!" In the dream, freezers had a venting system that hooked up to the outside of the house. The bear would be able to help because it could listen for the wind whistling or birds flapping around outside the vent to make sure defrosting wasn't necessary and the ductwork was open. It couldn't open the doors or anything. Also, the bear wouldn't be a huge, full-sized grizzly. The one pictured in the hypothetical set-up I imagined in the dream didn't quite come up to the kitchen counters when standing on all fours. So somehow the old lady had a supplier of sort-of-smallish bears. Still, it was a preposterous plan.
Edith, the neighbor, as I assume her name was, also wanted to use the bears as a security measure (which I had suspected, since bears seem like overkill for fridge care). She happened to own other rental properties throughout town, small houses she rented to families or whatever. Remember that the sign said that there "may be" bears.
"Oh, well maybe that's better," I figured. Maybe she puts the signs up in all the yards of her properties, but only gets bears for a couple properties, so people know the sign isn't an idle threat. I really did not want there to be a wild animal next door to my parents' house, because that seemed ridiculously unsafe.
My mom didn't know many details for me, and actually didn't even seem too interested in carrying on the conversation. But I was livid. I asked, "Does she know the neighborhood she lives in? Does she understand the population surrounding her house? Are there small children nearby?" My brother was still in elementary school in the dream, and I knew he did not need to live next to a giant bear. Plus, there are, like, a billion stories about why it doesn't work to have bears or wild animals as pets.
I started listing things that Edith should have done before instituting her bear-freezer-defroster plan. "Did she even do a poll? Does she know the population? Two-block radius. All she'd need to do is poll a two-block radius around her house and find out about the people who were going to have to be living by this bear."
My mom wasn't very helpful, and sort of hemmed and hawed. "Uhh, I don't think so...I don't really know..." She could see I was extremely upset about the whole situation, so was just being passive so I could have my say and work through my anger.
"Well, I will go over there, and I will tell her. This is unsafe! This is ridiculous! If she can't use a computer, I will. I will help her with the poll questions. She can tell me the questions she wants to ask and I will type them up. I will pass them out door to door. This is not right that people don't know there's going to be a bear living on this block!"
That's pretty much all I can remember. I never vocalized it in the dream, but I was also thinking that clearly the woman next door was going to end up killed by the bear. The fridge I pictured was a 1970s model and avocado green with fake wood handles.
Click here to download the audio file of me telling the dream right after I woke up.
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