I'm in a car with my husband. He is driving and I am the passenger, which reflects waking life - he drives and I don't. We must be in some kind of touristy safari park place - because we keep passing by groups of big wild cats. (It's a normal car, not a jeep or a range rover or anything like that.) In waking life, I have never been to any of those places. The groups of wild cats all consist of one mother cat and a few cubs all snuggled together. It is adorable. I am a huge cat lover and lover of baby animals. I could spend all day watching videos of lion cubs and tiger cubs. The cats seem very relaxed and I know they aren't going to bother us. I realized after I woke up that these weren't real feline species, but that my mind had cobbled together characteristics of different types of cats. All the different species in my dream were medium sized - smaller than a lion but bigger than a bobcat. Then we get to a group of deer-like animals. The parent is separated from the young (I don't remember getting a good look at the young.) The parent was heavy set, and on waking I realized that it sort of had an American buffalo's face and an elk's skin and antlers. (I might not be remembering it exactly.) I sense that the *elk* is not going to like us near its children, and sure enough it starts walking toward us. I think that my husband is going to know what to do. The *elk* walks back and forth toward the car a few times. All this time, I am wondering if my husband is going to drive away and if so, in which direction. Then the *elk* charges the car and hits it, and then jumps back. There is no damage to the windscreen and we are safe in the car. The *elk* might have charged us twice in the dream; I don't remember. Whatever happened, there was never any damage to the car and we were safe. While all this was happening, my husband never moved the car. At the end of the dream, the *elk* was still around the car. When I woke up, the light from my SAD alarm clock was on, so that might have been what woke me up and the dream might actually have been meant to continue. Any thoughts?
The question that comes to mind is whether, or to what extent, your dream husband represents your waking-world husband or a husband/animus. If the latter, I recall Jung describing the contrasexual figure as a guide to the unconcious. All the more appropriate, then, that he should be driving in these lands new to you but marked, at first, by the cats you love. (Even, as dreams will do, cats specially created for you.) The question then becomes, why the transition? Why are you taken from the comparatively familiar to the new and uncomfortable? Lessons to be learned? Horizons to be broadened (in either or both worlds)? The deer/elk associations I leave to you; but the car ramming incident suggests the head-down charge two elk might make at the start of a dominance fight and, at least things stand, neither male of neither species has given ground. If this were my dream, I'd also find my emotional state during it and immediately on waking relevant. My own experience has been is that if I'm afraid during a dream, I'm supposed to be; but, if fear comes only on waking, I've totally missed its message. Hope this helps.
I like your interpretation, Bob. I'm pretty sure that at least part of the dream husband was my waking world husband; I never thought that he could also be my animus, but that is possible. I never thought of the situation with the elk creature as having to do with dominance - it had more to do with protecting its young, and being wary of a creature getting too close to its young. (The situation with the cats was also all about parents with their babies.) I think the "babies" in this case might be more symbolic of newness or creativity than actual babies. It was the sense that you get when you are near an animal with young - that you shouldn't get too close because adult animals in the situation are very protective. Not fear, just the knowledge that you have to behave in a certain way in order to be safe. The same way that when you are waiting to cross a busy road, you wait for the traffic signal to change - you aren't frightened when you are waiting, you just know what you have to do in order to keep yourself safe. I actually had an experience with this in waking life. I was at a zoo, looking at a baboon exhibit, and I was looking at an adorable young baboon was near the plexiglass at the front of the exhibit. I must have looked at it for a moment too long, because suddenly a large and very muscular male baboon, which had been peacefully sitting and relaxing on a cliff at the far end of the exhibit, was ramming his body hard against the plexiglass in front of me. It scared the shit out of me. So I am very conscious of how protective animals are of their young. Other than looking at the cat "families" and thinking how cute they were, I didn't really feel any emotions during the dream. It was more intellectual - just understanding how the elk was going to react and then wondering what my husband was going to do.