PSYCHOSCAPES: A dream about killing The Golden Trout

CC Jean Stimmell: 9/27/14

A dream about killing The Golden Trout

In my dream, I go camping with my son. We park the car in a remote state park and start hiking up to high ground to pitch our tent. We walk up an enchanting stream gorge where I take photos of brilliant yellow flowers, the shape and size of lamp shades. At the top we discover an exquisite mountain pond with a dam at one end. My son tries fishing with my fly rod but, having no luck, declares this isn’t a good place to fish. I disagree and start tying a new fly on my line with great difficulty because the leader is all tangled and full of knots. After accomplishing the task, I realize I have tied on a huge fly, a life-size replica of a white bumble bee. I am irritated because I don’t think this fly will work at all but, before I can change it, some one nearby hollers out that indigenous people used to have good luck with bumblebees as bait.

As I am carefully negotiating across the narrow dam to get to the other side to fish, my fly falls over the dam into the discharge stream below. When I retrieve my line, there is a lot of flopping and resistance: to my amazement, I find I have caught a type of trout I had never seen before: an amazing specimen, iridescent gold and rotund to the point of being almost round, not slender like the average trout. A camper watching me from his camper told me I have caught a golden trout. I call my son over to show him the fish but already it is becoming drab, its luminous colors fading as it dies. I can see the fish is suffering, chokingly trying to breath. I look around for a club to hit her on the head to put her out of her misery – agonizing the whole time about whether that is the right thing to do, or will it just cause more suffering.

Regrettably, it never occurs to me in my dream to let the golden trout live by putting her back in the water. However, after remembering the dream the next morning, I now feel very guilty: here I was, lucky enough to find Anima but rather than cherishing Her for who She is, I tried to possess her –killing her instead.

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In a bit of synchronicity:
Soon after my dream, Russet and I were in the White Mountains. While taking a hike up to Artist’s Bluff, our dog rolled in an horribly smelling, dead animal carcass. We had to find some place quick to give her a bath. Descending the nearest path from the bluff, we came out at Echo Lake, a beautiful high mountain pond that, in a very visceral way, reverberated with my dream image. Even more surreal, the water in the pond was held in by a narrow dam, corresponding closely to the one in my dream as you can see in the photograph below.

The first photograph at the beginning of this blog is of Echo Lake. As in my dream, anglers were fly casting for trout along the edge. I manipulated the tones and colors to more closely resemble my dream state. Unfortunately, there was no golden trout –I had to add that.