Observations placeholder
Morrells, Luce and the dead duck
Identifier
007111
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The use of birds in visions is widespread and a great number of birds can be found as symbols – eagles ravens , magpies, songsters like the blackbird, doves, geese, seagulls, owls, nightingales, cuckoos, hawks, and quails. The use of sea birds, swimming birds and songbirds is very widespread. There is always a strong link with personality and the attributes of the observer.
All the birds are symbolic, but the seagull is effectively chastising the observer for being so poor at observing. A duck, when it is feeding, keeps its head down and doesn't observe what is going on round it. It doesn't keep an open mind or see its surroundings. Lewis Carroll summed up this really well in Alice in Wonderland when it described the duck. Some visions or dreams of birds are entirely personal, as this one was. The symbolism could only have been deduced from knowing the observer, [which I do], what the observer was doing and also knowing the observer had a great fondness for Lewis Carroll and thus would cotton on to the symbolism eventually.
A description of the experience
This was a dream from which I woke up. Initially I was watching geese flying in V formation. This can be easily explained because that day I had been playing on the computer and looking up on the web for programs which simulated flocking and whether they existed [which they did]. They had some quite good simulated video clips of geese in v formation they had created using the program, I think I was just seeing this in replay.
But then I switched and I was on either a boat or in a range rover or something like it, - it seemed to keep changing in the dream - going up a river, slow flowing, with jungle like trees on either side. On the water were some ducks, little white ones paddling about. It all seemed quite peaceful. Suddenly this enormous gull came down and picked up one of the ducks and held it by its neck flying towards us. There were feathers everywhere, the poor little thing looked like it might be dead, it was very limp. The gull was bigger than me, but it perched in what I assume became the prow of the boat holding the head of the duck towards me.
Then it first picked off the top of each eye of the duck, [I can't explain this, eyes don't have tops I know, but these did] then it pulled the whole eye out of the eye socket. The eye looked like an eye as it came out, about the size and shape of a mussel. This little head was pointed straight at me with its empty sockets pointing towards me. No blood just dark caverns. I wasn't frightened and oddly not horrified, but I know I wondered whether it was dead or not. Then the gull kept on tapping it on the back of the head and its little limp head kept nodding in time.....
Then I woke up. And, just like every time I have one of these dreams, I sat in the dark with my heart thumping wondering 'what was all that about?'