Coming to Blows

Dreams, lately, have felt like a mirror I can’t avoid. They have a way of untangling and exposing thoughts and emotions that, in waking life, I manage to ignore.

There was a time when I painted every day, and wrote every day. Each morning I kept a dream journal, capturing whatever fragments remained before they slipped away. Those dreams, strange, vivid, and often overwhelming, would find their way into my work. They fueled it. They gave shape to things I didn’t yet understand.

But like my painting, that practice eroded.

Between circumstance and health, something wore down. The creative instinct that once felt constant has atrophied. My dreams changed with it. They became smaller, heavier. No longer imaginative or inspiring, but repetitive. Workdays replayed in full, or sprawling, labyrinthine reflections of past trauma. Dreams where I would live through an entire shift and feel it, or wander through endless, shifting discomfort. I would wake up already tired, already in pain. These were not dreams worth remembering. They lingered instead, like a weight I carried into the day.

I have never leaned heavily into mysticism or the divination of dreams, but I do understand their function. Sleep is a kind of sorting process. The mind filters the day, deciding what is kept, what is stored, what is surfaced again. In that state, when everything is more open and more loosely connected, ideas and feelings emerge in symbolic ways. Not mystical, necessarily, but meaningful. We recognize patterns. We attach significance. We interpret.

Last night was different.

I dreamt I was standing in a field, looking out over a hill. In the distance, animals appeared in pairs. Two horses, two mountain lions, two wildebeest, two camels, two giraffes. Each pair turned on itself. Without warning, they began to fight. Not cautiously, but violently. Teeth, hooves, force. It was chaotic and strangely deliberate at the same time.

I remember trying to photograph it. But the moment resisted being captured. It felt both sudden and slowed, like watching a painting come alive, too detailed, too layered to fully grasp.

In waking life, I had just returned from holiday. It was needed more than I realized. My job supports me financially, but the burnout has been building quietly. My health has suffered. My art has too.

Even after the break, it only took two days back at work to feel drained again. The handover I had prepared did not hold. Tasks were undone or done incorrectly. What should have been shared became mine alone. Two weeks of work waiting to be caught up.

On the third day, I tried working from home. But after a series of mistakes and, finally, a poorly timed power outage, I ended up lying face down on the floor and calling it lunch. I have never wanted to cry so much all at once, and yet could not. By the end of the day, I felt not just exhausted, but angry. Angry at how little I had managed to do. Angry at the way it all seemed to collapse so quickly.

That night, I forced myself to paint.

But what came out was not good, or at least, it did not feel good. One of the downsides of working digitally is how easy it is to erase. If something does not feel right, if it does not spark anything, I delete it. That means there is no record, no accumulation, nothing to reflect on or learn from. Just absence.

There is also a quiet resistance in me now. I do not want to create dark things anymore. So when that is all that comes out, I discard it. And with that, I discard the effort too.

Which brings me back to the dream.

For once, it was not a replay of work or a resurfacing of trauma, but it was not unrelated either.

There is a common interpretation that animals appearing in pairs in dreams can represent inner conflict. Opposing forces within the self. Tension. Competing needs.

Each of the animals I saw carries its own symbolic weight:

Horses, freedom and movement. Their conflict suggests a struggle with constraint and a desire to break free.

Mountain lions, strength, power, agility. A confrontation with personal power.

Wildebeest, resilience and adaptability. Difficulty adjusting to pressure or change.

Camels, endurance and patience. The burden of persevering.

Giraffes, perspective and vision. The need to step back and see the bigger picture.

But more than any single meaning, it was the duality that stood out. Each creature turned on its own reflection. Not predator and prey. Not conflict between different things, but conflict within the same thing.

Desire against responsibility. Rest against obligation. Expression against restraint.

I can recognize all of it. None of these interpretations feel misplaced. They map too easily onto where I am right now, caught between what I want, what I need, and what I feel I have to endure.

It would be easy to say this is something to resolve. That balance is possible, if I just confront it directly.

But the truth is,

I am just so very tired.