This morning I woke from an insanely deep and vivid dream. It was like a full length movie. I hate that I cannot remember all the details exactly. The most memorable part was how I was communicating and interacting with all of these intelligent, fully aware beings as my friends and peers only to realize near the end of the dream that they were actually not human.
Perhaps the dream was brought about because of my recent vibrant communications with animals. While in the pet store I came so close to understanding the thoughts of the parrot in the cage. Sam (our dog) regularly sends me her exact thoughts through all the verbal and non-verbal communication that she is capable of. Every day I flooded with the songs of birds. Once a squirrel even yelled at me to get out of his forest. When I ride by the cows and horses I joyfully attempt to tell them hello, in their language.
I’m a polyglot with a gift for communication. It’s perhaps my greatest super-power. I’d call myself an “empath” except such types tend to use their near telepathy for good and so often I have used mine for evil. My whole life I’ve been told that I have a particularly evil ability to destroy someone verbally. But I like to focus on the good part. Building people up, “holding space” and motivating them to find themselves and see them as I do. I prefer watching movies with excellent acting and writing above any animation because I need to see the non-verbal messages from the characters. I live for slight queues as to what it going on behind the words that are coming out of their mouths. I do the same thing with animals and always have. Visiting the zoo was always one of my favorite things to do, until some of the animals clearly communicated they didn’t want to be there anymore, like that scene from Harry Potter.
There’s no doubt that being outside and around so many living creatures has affected my subconscious. But I believe this dream (and dreams in general) are more than just random organic arts works created by our neural network as it recuperates. Dreams do mean something.
This dream means I need to live a vegan life again, for now. The happiest I have ever been in my life was when I was completely vegan. It is not that I believe humans shouldn’t eat meat. (Humans very clearly as biologically designed to eat it or meat would not smell as good as it does when it is cooking.) It’s that eating something that was living and expensively raised and killed unceremoniously for my culinary pleasure is a choice I don’t have to make if I don’t want to. Knowing that my daily actions are not contributing to that world gives me a lot of personal satisfaction.
In many ways eating animals is like sex. Yes, it is good, but within limits. The urge to eat meat is not unlike the urge to fuck every MILF and PYT I pass on the street. Having the urge makes us human, not acting on the urge makes us civilized. Humans are animals. There is simply no denying that. But we are animals that have evolved to a point where we actually understand what it means to be alive, to experience pain, and joy. My dog may experience those things but cannot articulate them, reason about them, and make a choice to further “be a dog.” Dog’s gonna dog. Humans, on the other hand, aren’t dogs. We do understand the difference and are capable of making that choice to act on our animal instincts or curb them for the greater good.
This decision is a person one, although I am writing it in a public forum. I don’t have any problem talking about it, but I do want to avoid the usual, overly “woke” vegan tendency to be in everyone’s face about one’s personal food choices. Whether to eat meat or not is very much in the “religious” category when it comes to polite discourse. In other words, it’s a personal topic generally to be avoided with people unless they ask about it.