I typically have fairly bizarre dreams, and even more so if I’ve taken a sleeping pill  before going to bed. Last night’s dream wasn’t Advil PM induced, but it was kind of odd, even for me.

The dream was the narration of an old, epic story, something along the lines of a Beowulf kind of saga. Hell, my dream started with the image of a pair of weathered male hands, flipping the pages of a large old book. It was the story about an unlikely pack of three wolves: a large grey-black female wolf, and a pair of male wolves, who were actually halves of the same being (remember back in the 90’s when DC Comics split Superman into two halves: Superman-Red and Superman-Blue? That’s kind of what the male wolves were like). They were smaller than the grey wolf, and one was pure white and the other was fire orange.

The idea was that in whatever world these wolves lived in (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away), the nighttime lasted longer than the daytime. But strangely enough, their forest world had two small, non-identical suns. One of the suns was white hot, the other was fire orange. The grey wolf was the animalized version of the night: she was the large full moon. The male wolves were the suns.

In my dream, I couldn’t “hear” all of the narration being read, but I caught some of it. Because the wolves were somehow physically tied into the suns and moon, they needed to take care of each other.

When it was daytime, the sun moons protected the moon wolf. And because the grey wolf and moon were bigger and stronger than the sun wolves and suns, the grey wolf protected them at night. It was only during dusk and dawn that the wolves could all be together at the same time. Otherwise, they slept, being protected by the other. The sun wolves had to remain together at all times: if one was killed, the other one would immediately die. I didn’t find out if the suns would die if the wolves died, or vice versa. I would guess so, like I would assume the grey wolf would die if something happened to the moon, and vice versa for her. I was totally into this story, for what I knew of it (even though it was a creation of my own imagination). I wished this was already an existing story. I’m not sure I could fill in the empty spots of the story well enough to do it justice.

I think the ending of my dream might have been the ending of the story.

There had been a great battle, between the wolves and some magical beasts, during dusk. The grey wolf and the sun wolves were all injured, but they managed to all make it to safety in an unknown cave, as the suns set and the moon rose. The monsters couldn’t find them. The sun wolves collapsed for the night, badly wounded. The moon wolf stood watch over them, guarding them at the entrance of the cave. She was badly wounded too, barely able to stand, and by all rights, should have been killed. Because she was already bigger and stronger than the rest of her pack, she survived.

The wolf image here is what I thought of when I was remembering my dream.

The last line of the epic poem was the single thought of the moon wolf’s duty, as it has been the duty of all the previous generations of moon wolves before her: “I am the Night Wolf. I protect the Sun Wolves when it is black. When it is day, the Sun Wolves protect the Night Wolf.” It was repeated a couple times in my dream like the Night Wolf was thinking it as a mantra for herself.

And I realized, before the dream ended, that I was the Night Wolf. I don’t know who the Sun Wolves were. But that line about being the Night Wolf seemed so haunting to me. It was to have been a line I heard somewhere before.

I went online to see if I could find it anywhere, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.