Nonhuman animals of many different kinds, some species of which I have never met on Earth, often enter my dreams. Considering that my awake-time as a veterinarian is filled with animal health and welfare challenges and hands-on experience in relieving animal suffering in many parts of the world, and that I live alone with three dogs much of the time (when my wife is in India helping animals), is understandable. My dreams often surprise me, as well as disturb, inspire, and inform.

Years ago as a psychology professor at Washington University, St. Louis, I taught the accepted belief that animals in our dreams are primarily projections from our own "subconscious," the zoomorphic embodiments of various emotions. I always felt that this shallow view was an inaccurate, simplistic presumption, based in part on a culturally distorted, analytical perspective that was born in an environment with very little contact with animals for most urban, "civilized" people.

This shallow psychological interpretation of the significance of animals in our dreams demeaned, demythologized and dis-empowered animals of their totemic, healing, and self-revealing potency and significance to us both mentally and spiritually. This pseudoscientific orientation was the result of many mainstream psychologists and psychoanalysts turning their discipline away from the holisms of mental life – imagination, subjectivity, and iconic imagery; peak and mystical experiences; the metaphysics and significance of the sacred; understanding the processes and states of transcendence; the consequences of prayer, contemplation, and meditation; the etymology, ethology, and ethnology of animal-inspired ritual, dance, and music; and the epistemology of animal-centered belief systems that affect how we feel and perceive.

Over the past century, psychology has become "scientific," reductionistic (making simplistic correlations) and increasingly mechanistic (notably, Pavlovian, and later Skinnerian) and even industrial and organizational. Little wonder that this parsimonious science of mind that denied animals soul, psyche, and awareness violated the spirit and sanctity of their being by sanctioning in some of the most hideously conceived experiments on animals that parallel the worst experiments done on humans by Nazi medical scientists, in the name of progress and knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

It is this same rationalistic psychology that had me, in my younger years, say that animals in our dreams are just projections of our fears, fantasies, phobias, desires, conflicts, base instincts, and perversions. This psychology does violence to our humanity by having us deny the possibility that animals are themselves in our dreams, that they come to us as part of the dream that is dreaming us when we are in dreamtime, and are as real as when we are awake.

This psychology impoverishes our dreamscapes, making other animals one- dimensional. We should abhor this impoverishment just as we abhor and protest the annihilation of biodiversity and the life and beauty of this living, dreaming Earth. Until we become part of the dream of the Earth again in our waking and sleeping, and protect and cherish endangered species and vanishing forests, jungles, and swamps, and dream in the life and beauty of Nature, we will never experience true happiness and pure moments of joy, because our world will be one of make-believe: a virtual reality.

This psychology asserts that our only connection with animals is through anthropomorphic projection, which, the scientists say, is evident when pet owners ascribe human emotions to their companion animals. Behaviorism’s "law of parsimony" insists that any behavior of an animal must be interpreted from a simplistic, mechanistic perspective in order to avoid anthropomorphizing, i.e., the behavior is under instinctual control, and is therefore unconscious, because the animal is not self-conscious or self-aware and has no free will. Therefore, no animal could become a separate, independent "other" into our dreams. Such an anthropocentric shrinking of our dreamscape is coupled with the empiricists’ decimation of the dreamscape itself, by reasoning that all dream animals are figments of imaginative projection.

As the science of mind and psyche and animal behaviorism condone the raising of socially-dependent chimpanzees in isolation cubicles, turning baboons into cocaine addicts, subjecting dogs to inescapable shock (as an anthropomorphic "model" of human anxiety and learned helplessness), and subjecting cats to sleep deprivation, our empathic and ancient, psycho-spiritual connection with these sentient others is severed, along with our primary perception and sense of communion. This is why I see most experiments on animals, ostensibly designed to help understand and cure various human maladies, as being a product of a state of mind that is a far more pernicious malady than anything that it seeks to cure, because it is the cause of most of the ills – social, environmental, emotional, and physical – that afflict us today.

During my time in graduate and postgraduate research, I experimented on various animals, and some came into my dreamtime. Their suffering also became mine. Their suffering was always minimal, if at all, but some I had to kill. Some I came to know and loved in waking and dreaming. They came to me in my dreams and sometimes they spoke to me of their suffering for all beings under human dominion. I knew other biomedical and developmental psychobiology research scientists, who seems to have little concern for their animal subjects, be it in person, or reflected in their published research and presentations at scientific conferences and symposia.

The excorporation and unsoulment of the beingness and sanctity of animals in our awaketime is reflected in our interpretation of their presence in our dreamtime. This interpretation is as fallacious as the ethics and animal relationship of experimental psychologists and other animal-using scientists during their awaketime. Having been one of them, I wonder how animals manifest in their dreams and how indeed they respond to the animals in their dreams, and on reflection when they’re awake and at work, or in contemplation.

I had nightmares of rows and rows of rhesus monkeys at the National Institutes of Health after I saw them incarcerated for life. They came into my dreams not because I was identifying with them and projecting my own hitherto sublimated feelings of social oppression, enforced conformity, and exploitation. They touched a deeper, empathic core of injustice because I saw them as sentient spirit-beings who should be chattering and swinging in the trees and racing over rocks beneath an open sky. So when they repeatedly entered my dreamscape, I experienced the nightmare of the paradox of our perception and treatment of sentient Others, and becoming the Other, I also became the stainless steel cages, the fluorescent lights, and the people in white coats doing to me what they would never do to themselves.

Animals in the form of edible parts and as toy-like machines have also occasionally entered and informed my dreamscape. Before I became a vegetarian, I never had a dream about eating meat. Once I stopped eating meat, however, I found myself in several dreams standing before a large table with all kinds of edible animal parts that I wanted to eat and for which I could feel my body crave. But after some six months or so as a vegetarian, this same dream scene evoked a physical revulsion to the various beef, pork, poultry, and fish fare laid before me, and feelings of sadness and disgust as I searched the table for non-animal food that I could eat. It was a revelation to me that a conscious ethical decision like not eating the flesh of other animals any more would have such a profound influence on my dream consciousness and physical and emotional reactions to meat in the dream state.

One of the most disturbing dreams that brought together feelings of despair and inadequacy involved three very sick puppies, who literally fell apart as I picked each one up to examine. As they began to disintegrate, their body parts and various internal organs turned into a jumble of clockwork pieces – cogs, springs, nuts and bolts. In my waking state, I have always been incompetent as a repairman. My efforts to mend broken mechanical things often resulted in being unable to properly put all the parts back together again. The puppies becoming little broken machines clearly underscored my sense of incompetence as a veterinarian and occasions of feeling overwhelmed treating sick and injured animals at our Animal Refuge in India.

On many occasions, my animal patients who suffered from various ailments would enter my dreams, and the next day I would have a clearer understanding of their condition and of the appropriateness and effectiveness of various treatments. It was in the dreamtime that I first began to "feel-see" where they were hurting. This sensitivity subsequently transferred to the waking state, first in the presence of an animal patient, and subsequently while speaking on the telephone, or reading a letter about a sick animal.

Some of my animal patients who died, or whom I euthanized, would subsequently enter my dreams, usually in the best of health, as though to assure me that wherever they might have gone in spirit, they were well. The more connected I became with animals and more mindful of them during wakefulness, the more I was aware of their separate presence when they entered my dreamtime. They revealed to me aspects of their behavior, intelligibility, and even symptoms of diseases to me in my dreams that I only subsequently verified during awaketime consciousness and interaction.

This confirmed for me the independent origination and manifestation of animals in my dreams. They were not figments of my imagination, embodiments of subconscious emotions and fabricated projections of my own particular ego defenses and related psychopathology. On the contrary, as teachers, allies, totems, heirophanies and theophanies, their beingness is forever healed and made whole in the eternal now of our own being when we are awake and when we are dreaming. The shamanic leap of becoming the Other – the dreamtime wolf, jaguar, deer – in the synthesis of dream and reality, creates an ethical, empathic and visionary bridge between humanity and other animality, and between the sacred and the mundane.

I have been chased by live elephants in my dreams before and after being chased by them in the wild. In dreamtime and awaketime, they are all the same, creating between us the ethos of awesome power and majesty. The alchemy of this one of many dreamtime Animal Powers is in the embrace of terror itself, or whatever emotion the dreamtime animal evokes. There is no running away any more. We stand our ground, not in defiance, but in humility and in reverence of our being with all beings; invincible in love and seeking their forgiveness for how we humans have exploited and abused them.

After one of my periods of service in India, a tiger, in my dreamtime, came out of the jungle and attacked me. It was a frontal attack, and as I embraced the tiger before she had the chance to kill me, I felt the power of my love for her and for her jungle rise within me. To my surprise and subsequent delight, the tiger became a beautiful woman and we made love.

After dreaming of an Indian elephant’s suffering and feeling the pain in my body, I have awakened to see my wife Deanna complaining of pain in her body, precisely where that elephant was injured half the world away from our life-space and dreamscape. Deanna and I both know this elephant, whom we call Loki. Deanna knows Loki far more than I, because she and her field team had cared for him for months. She is an empath, able to enter the body of another and feel what the other is feeling, hurting, and perhaps needing to be well. Deanna had entered Loki’s body on several occasions when she was awake, and she now feared not being able to get out. But Loki showed a way out for me in my dreams.

The way out was for me to tell the world of Loki’s suffering and of the fading of elephant dreamtime and presence, since his kind will soon become extinct in the wild. Those in captivity go berserk if they’re not given the loving, caring sanctuary of those humans who can still dream with elephants and not flee from duty and responsibility to care for all that lives and dreams within the Dream of the Earth: the heart of Brahman, the mind of God.

The heart-mind of divinity that feels all and knows all touched me in one dream where I was reliving the slaughter of one of many cows I had filmed the day before, after following them on the road to slaughter in S. India. The embodiment of agony in a cow-like creature who had been skinned alive became mine as I felt and heard every muscle, nerve, and tendon scream, as two half-naked, sweating men tore and bludgeoned the writhing form to dismember and dispirit this sacred being. Her eyes rolled back as she turned toward me and I recognized her. Her spirit and her agony entered me as she writhed and died, and I knew I had seen into her eyes earlier as she traveled to slaughter on the notorious cattle death march in S. India.

After the embrace of the tiger in dreamtime, I came to respect and trust my instincts and intuition. The power of the tiger in this dream was the power of love that is far greater than the love of power and the fear of death. In real life and in dreamtime, I have lived and played and slept with wolves and the more I knew them as individual persons, the more they came into my dreams embodying the same personas that I knew in wakefulness. Their beingness remained unchanged in both states of consciousness and when they began to speak to me in my dreams, so they spoke to me more when I was awake.

Animals in our dreams are as real as animals in the waking state when our consciousness is fully integrated with their being through what Australian aboriginal elders call the Dreamtime. They are both real and also symbolic, or totemic, metaphysical, archetypal, mythic, and empathic projections and introjections from the unified field of being and forever becoming. Ancestral spirits and primordial, creative energies in the dreamscape and in the ecology and geology of the landscape are revealed to us in our lucid dreams and n waking moments of great clarity, leading us into the boundless circle of compassion and reverence for all our sacred relations and relationships, with wolves and forests and swamps and frogs.

I have met what I can only call archetypal animals and other beings in my dreams, who have taken me into their spirit-realm that is a Peaceable Kingdom of light and beauty where every being is attuned to all others and all are conscious of what is happening to sentient beings in the human realm of conscious exploitation and communion. I have flown, swam, and raced with them, sometimes awakening in laughter or wonder at their playful good humor and awesome powers. Sometimes I have awakened in the dreamscape to dream the dream, becoming one of them in form and spirit so as to engage with them in a different space and time, forever shape-shifting, and forever one.

As with disconnected spirits and rational minds, we are able to dam rivers, trap wolves, drain swamps, and turn trees into logs, so the medico-scientific mind, that denies other animals any conscious self-awareness, reduces the significance of their being in or dreams, as well as in life. The ecology of our dreamscapes, and the richness and significance of our dreams are becoming as impoverished as the physical reality of our increasingly unnatural, Nature-deprived waking state. This impoverishment of dream, imagination, and reality is an impoverishment of mind and spirit. This means that because of the resonance between our inscapes and the landscapes we inhabit, when we harm Nature’s polyculture and turn it into a polluted and industrialized monoculture – a biological and spiritual wasteland – no matter how technologically "advanced" we may be, we harm ourselves irrevocably. We are becoming a biologically anomalous life form, its disconnectedness form the natural world in dreamtime and awaketime making it unaware that it has mutated or "morphed" into a virtual replica of the truly human, living in the virtual reality of its own artifice and depraved existence, that it regards as normative, if not culturally progressive.

So the conservation of endangered species and their habitats, and reconnecting ourselves culturally and emotionally with other animals and Nature, has as much to do with saving our own psyches and spirits from extinction as with saving and restoring the life and beauty of the natural world.

Animals will move more freely in the totality of their being, in our dreams and in our waking lives, as messengers, manifestations of divine conception, when we too begin to move more freely between the realms of dream and wakefulness that are part of a greater reality with which we have yet to consciously engage and creatively participate. This is possible, once our minds are liberated from the tyranny of rationalism and the need to control. When our enchantment with insensate technologies and the love of power and fear of death, give way to a deeper involvement and participatory evolvement with life through the power of love. When we acknowledge our kinship with all of Creation, and act accordingly.

To "act accordingly," according to the wisdom of indigenous shamanic and animistic traditions, and of "deep ecology, ethology, and Creation-centered spirituality, is to be authentic and to be oneself, allowing and enabling all others, human and nonhuman, to be free to dream their dreams and live their lives without the chains and cages of convention, artifice, ignorance, arrogance, and greed.