While our rabbit, Bear, was still alive I would have dreams of his hutch being destroyed; a falling tree demolishing it during a storm, or a malevolent child from down the street breaking into the back garden and kicking it to pieces in order to get to him. Your common or garden fare, really.
But last night’s dream raised the bar to a whole new level. Or maybe lowered it to more depraved depths. I’m undecided.
Open on a version of my back garden that is a complete stranger to a lawn mower. It is pock-marked with holes, bald patches, weeds and random trash. In what looks more like a cage than a hutch huddles a version of Bear. The cage would seem cruel, were it not for what lies and lurks in the scrub surrounding. There are tufts of fur and rabbit flesh everywhere. There are bloody limbs that have been detached in a less than surgical way. Most bizarre of all (to this point) is what could be described as an abstract sculpture or effigy made of rabbit body parts, a bloody piece of modern art that reminds me very much, in the moment, of the burned, mutated corpse Macready and company discover outside the Norwegian outpost at the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing.
In my peripheral vision, I register movement. Rabbits. Strange, malevolent rabbits. Several of them. Stalking me like predators. One or two have on items of clothing. The one that sticks with me is a striped red and white top. I retreat to the house and quickly close the door behind me as the animals, it seems anyway, move in for the kill.
By this time, the one in the striped top has evolved into some kind of human baby/rabbit hybrid. My own children, still toddlers in the dream , flank me, marvelling at what probes them through the triple-glazing. They knock on the glass, the same way children do at the zoo to get the attention of the animal on the other side. In answer, this bizarre creature, who towers over them now and uses its tail to stabilise itself, like a large kangaroo, paws the glass, like countless videos we have all seen of big cats in zoos viewing small children like they are items in a buffet. Then… I woke up… thinking about how I would summarise the description of the human/baby rabbit hybrid’s face as that of a one-year-old 71-year-old. WTF does that mean? Needless to say, I did not get back to sleep.
Rest in peace, Bear. (Dec 2014 – May 2024)
