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I don’t think this dream needs much “interpreting”–I am putting it up for the pure delight of being in it. I know the person who had this dream and that she is starting a new venture, so it is particularly delightful for me to read. To see her, in her inner space, feeling so powerful and excited and free. A perfect animus dream to my way of thinking. Not power over someone else or control, but harnessing the power of the wind to move you along. Being exhilerated by challenges rather than overwhelmed or frozen or hardened by them. Even if fear also is present.
I hope you can enter into this dream and feel it yourself!

A mother and baby deer run together. I see a yellow ribbon circling around their legs like a lasso, swirling around and around as they run. I realize that it will get tangled if they keep running, and that it will bring them down. I go to help them as someone else goes to get scissors. I can’t wait though because time is of the essence. I can’t imagine that they’ll let me get close, and I know deer hooves can be sharp and dangerous. However, they do let me approach them, and I lean down and grab the ribbon and gently begin to pull. And it just starts to unravel, easily slipping off as I keep pulling. No scissors needed. Then they are free, and the mother is very affectionate with me, like I am now part of them. I sit on the ground, and she comes up behind me and stands with her chest against my back, putting her head on top my head. It feels good, comforting, but also a little strange. And I am not sure if I think it feels confining.
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Running is what deers do, but how can they run with a ribbon around their legs? Ribbons are pretty, attached to gifts, worn in young girls’ hair, or given as prizes. Yellow ribbons have become associated with rembrance of lost love, with prisoners of war.
The dreamer wants to help but doubts she can get close to this wildness and fears if she does, she may be injured. But she risks the danger and acts in spite of doubt because she knows that the legs of the deer are at risk. Legs connect to ground, to survival, to freedom and joyful movement. This is worth all risks. The time is right and time is of the essence.
She unravels the tangle, the “pretty” but ultimately crippling bond/cord. Unravelling reminds me of the gentle but persistent process of becoming aware of the me, not me.
The dreamer is literally crowned with the mother deer. I am wondering if this is a way of the dreamer saying to herself “You are loved and loving, mother in the best sense, animal mother.” The image I have is of a native dancer wearing one of those large headdress/masks and becoming the embodiment of the animal/spirit.
The dreamer wonders if this new “crown” will be confining. As with the ribbon, she knows the dangers of connections that restrict and confine. She is asking whether it is possible to receive gratitude and affection , to take on power,and still move freely. This connection is occurring at the top of the head (crown chakra), not at the root chakra like the yellow ribbon. The dreamer has earned this blessing through compassion, risk taking, skill and persistence. It has not, like the yellow ribbon, been thrust on her in unconsciousness. Still, she is right to wait and evaluate. Perhaps there is more to come in terms of full embodiment or integration of the connection that liberates.

A soldier enters the back gate. He is dressed in camouflage, the grey and black, not the brown and green camouflage. He is wearing a cap of the same grey-black camouflage and is carrying a long thin gun. I notice myself feeling very frightened by his intrusion. My heart is pounding.

He makes his way diagonally across the grass, walking slowly, deliberately toward the corner near where I am sleeping. In that corner of the yard, my husband has created a little sanctuary, with stepping stones, a petal shaped bird bath, and a curved stone bench, surrounded by drooping branches of butterfly bushes, red-centered white altheas, small pots of bells, and low moonglow bushes edging the patio.

The light has grown brighter now. The soldier sits on the curved bench in the corner sanctuary, leans forward, locks eyes with me and grins. I try to summon a powerful no nonsense voice…..” I want you out of my yard.” My sense of firmness is there but the sound comes out more like a groan. I say again, “I WANT YOU OUT OF MY YARD.”

He gets up and walks out the gate.

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Ellie’s response:
I am, as I enter this dream, lulled by the scene, a sense of amost fairy tale enchantment, including a sleeping beauty in a “sanctuary” as she describes it. She is cocooned. I can feel the security and comfort, the softness. and then Dawn begins to “lighten” things. I feel a movement in that lightening–from the safe dark feminine embrace to…..? In myth and fairy tale, it is the in-between times where magic can most easily enter. But what enters here shocks me, rattles me. With the lightening of the dawn I might have expected bird song or a rabbit to enter…….or maybe a prince. Instead it is a soldier. And his camouflage does not have the warmth or life of green and brown–it is black and gray. I feel a chill looking at him as he purposefully walks, with his gun, toward the feminine in her sanctuary. Is she trapped by the “locked eyes”?
“He grins”. At that moment so many questions arise in me. Is this a malevolent figure that needs to be driven away, as she tries to do? Or is he a form of masculine power that needs to be integrated? How do you feel? I might ask the dreamer, when you order him out and he leaves? How might you feel if you fixed tea for him instead? Is there a need for his power, his darkness? Is it possibly the darkness of Kali, of Shiva? Though I am drawn to the sweet safe haven in the first part of the dream, it seems slumbrous, still, while there is something in the soldier that seems to wake the energy up, enliven it. Which is part of the death cycle. Death of the old, in order for something new to come in. The cocoon image that the dreamer uses makes me think of protection, but it is also where death and rebirth occur.
The soldier is an image that Bill Plotkin discusses in his book “Soulcraft”. He believes many of us have as a “sub-personality” what he calls the “Loyal Soldier”. This soldier’s mission, which begins in youth, is “to develop and deploy whatever strategies were necessary to assure your…survival.” However, this soldier’s strategies, which may have helped us as children, are now, as adults, keeping us from being fully alive. Plotkin compares the Loyal Soldier to the Japanes soldiers of World War II who were stranded on isolated islands after shipwrecks or planes crahses, and were unaware for years of the war’s end. When these soldiers were rescued, Japanese communities often honored them and treated them as heroes, eventually enabling them “to reinvent themselves and ….rejoin society”. Is this the message of the soldier in the dream? Is he a tired old veteran who would like to be welcomed into the garden to rest and transform?
I have mixed feelings in reaction to the dreamer ordering him out. I feel relieved and that it is good she stood up for what she wanted. I feel disappointed also though not to know more about him. But usually we get a second chance with such characters, and a third, and so on until we get the full message they have for us.