dream: animal companions

[coraa]

My dream last night was embarrassingly Mercedes Lackey/Anne McCaffrey bonded-animal-companion-esque, with a side order of Pullman's daemons. Cut because I do realize that my dreams are not interesting to most people...



It was very YA-book, group-of-four-kids. Sort of semi-third-person from the POV of this guy with a J name - Jake or Josh or John or something - I mean, sometimes I was seeing him from the outside, and sometimes I was in his POV, and sometimes I was in the POV of his animal-companion, which is why the pronouns switch from 'they' to 'we' throughout. Anyway, J was the first of the kids to find his animal companion, a golden eagle. Shortly thereafter, the other three kids found theirs: a dark-skinned boy with a canine (sometimes it looked like a doberman, sometimes a jackal, sometimes an African spotted hunting dog), an Asian girl with a cat of some kind (it was striped like a tiger, but shaped and furred more like a clouded leopard... and I seem to remember that its stripes were cream and purple, of all things), and a chubby fair-skinned-dark-haired girl with an antelope or gazelle thing. (In the dream, these were all supposed to look like 'real' animals; I think it's the fault of dream logic that they tended to shift around, or had nonreal animal traits.) The animals were not flesh, but made of some kind of spiritstuff -- they were kind of translucent, and could only stay in the human/flesh/'real' world for a limited period of time, depending on the mental strength of their human companion. They couldn't really 'talk' -- there wasn't explicit two-way communication -- but animal and human had an empathic bond that only lasted for as long as the animal could remain in the flesh world. Once they returned to where they had come from, we were out of communication until we could muster up the mental strength to pull them back. (J's eagle was female, but all the other animals matched their people in gender. Interesting.)

Despite being semi-transparent, they were more than capable of affecting things in the physical world. In fact, the first thing that happened was that the four kids (who didn't know each other previously) wound up in this huge, labyrinthine library, where first J and then the other three went into trance states and 'met' their animals, and then... afraid, confused, and suspicious of one another, wound up fighting via their animals. (In actual fact, it was the girls who were most aggressive, and J bore the brunt of it because he was the first one to meet his animal and therefore they thought he was among the responsible parties for their kidnapping.)

I have no idea what purpose, if any, the animals served. I do know that at some point the four reconciled, and then their animals vanished and they had to undergo a quest to the spirit realm where the animals were forced to remain until their humans could summon them back. It was called the Wheel, and it was a big, cold, rather bleak grey-stone room, a huge oval as big as a football field, ringed around the edges with thousands of spirit-animals -- all of whom were far more transparent than ours, and in fact we had to find ours by looking for the more 'solid' spirit-animals among the mass. (Why we couldn't just look for the purple tiger, for instance, I don't know.) Once we had gone there and come back with our animals, the bond was stronger, and we could keep them with us for longer. (During our quest we were accompanied by a rather creepy man, who purported to be our teacher -- he lived in the huge library, I think -- who insisted that he had a spirit animal in the Wheel, too -- it just hadn't made itself known to him. There was some kind of confrontation with him at the end -- he may have been trying to coerce one of our animals in some way, or something -- and we got rid of him, and found out more about the people who had kidnapped us, and why... but I don't remember the details of that.)

There was also a lizard god who lived in the sun, who had some connection to the spirit animals and may have been the patron of the spirit/human bond. He turned up from time to time, but I only really remember one incident:

There was a trek through the desert (for reasons I don't remember), and a violent disagreement during which J once again was attacked by the other three. Rather than try to defeat the eagle, they instead tried to force her back to the Wheel, whereupon the lizard god emerged from the sun and flattened them all, and said that disagreements were not his concern but attempting to force a spirit animal back to the wheel was beyond the pale.

I think it came out later that the other three had excellent reason for mistrusting and attacking J, but I don't remember why. There was a real reconciliation, the Asian girl with the purple tiger took over as new leader of the group, and they succeeded in their goals... whatever those goals were. And I think wound up living in the library.

(There was a coda where I was watching movie executives try to cast actors for the roles, and I was frustrated that they kept making the kids too young and too pretty -- they were all awkward, fairly homely teenagers in the dream -- and then while arguing about this, I woke up.)

Comments

[triath.livejournal.com]

I always loved the bonded-animal-companion concept.