ladies and gentlemen, i present the northern musk ox in its natural habitat! most people don't realize how much they resemble kittens, and neither did i until i came across this prime specimen today in the frontier wilds of the sooke basin. cute little buggers, if i had not two such oxen already i'd have taken this one home.

last night to little surprise i dreamed muchly of owls. i'm still pretty captivated by yesterday's experience, though i'm pretty sure they were owls in their actual rather than symbolic state. that said, after the owls i had a dream unlike any other i remember.

moby starts that famous song, “in my dreams i'm dying all the time”. it's an evocative image, but one i'd never been fully able to relate to. but yup, it happened.

i remember it pretty clearly because i woke up right afterwards. it was about six in the morning, the world was the grey just past indigo, i got out of bed and pondered what had happened for a moment.

i remember this: i was climbing something high off the ground, i think a conveyor belt in a factory. i lost my grip, flailed for it and failed, and then i was falling. there was no life movie, i just remember looking down and estimating the height at about sixty feet, and regarding with some concern the solid slab of concrete floor rushing up at me. and i did the math; high school physics rarely fails me. sixty feet is about 18 metres but we're gonna call it 20, and acceleration due to gravity is about 9.8 metres per second per second (as in, squared and not as in, a typo) and we're gonna call it ten, so we're five metres in after the first second and travelling at ten meters per second, and then we're 20 metres in after the second second and going twenty metres per second and , ummm, cement time comes somewhere around 72km/h. even feet first i knew i wasn't gonna make it. and i really knew i wasn't going to make it when i didn't feel any pain.

as a child of twelve i once fell about 30 feet - about ten metres. broken tree branch, nature fails me sometimes. i remember the fall, i remember the sound of the leaves as i landed flat on my back. i remember the shock, i remember thinking, “this is really gonna hurt.” hello, and welcome to my first childhood visit to the hospital where, after hours and much radiation, they determined that i was somehow just fine. go figure. but i know the experience of being brought to earth unplanned, it's part of who i am. it's all about that moment between when you realize all is out of your control and the moment when you feel the consequences. freefall, i suppose.

so in my dream i died a nasty death, one that was my own fault. the cool part is i got to analyse the experience moments later in all of its detail. the weird part is that i really have no idea what dreams of dying mean. have you ever had one? what did it feel like after?