What a European Bison Dream Taught Me About Redirecting Power

I didn’t wake up with this dream. It came back to me later in the day, called up out of nowhere by a zimbru video that crossed my feed (a feed that is otherwise almost entirely BTS and cats), so there was no obvious reason for that animal to appear at all, except that it did. The moment it resurfaced, I recognized that it had handed me a capacity I hadn’t yet realized I had reached. And now I want to share it with you.

The sun was setting. I don’t know exactly where I was, only that it was somewhere dim and half-wild, the kind of place that sits just past where the paths are lit. Off to my left, close enough that I could have reached him without moving my feet, something moved in a bush. A zimbru. A European bison, enormous and still, reaching up for some branches in that same bush, watching me, if he was watching me at all, from almost inside my own space.

He wasn’t charging. As I recall it, there was nothing about him that frightened me. And still, something in me came instantly, fully awake, faster than thought, faster than fear even had time to register.

I didn’t decide what to do. I simply did it. I closed my hands around his horns and turned his attention away from wherever it had been resting, moving light and fast, while at the same time explaining to someone nearby what I was doing and why, as if I was keeping a lecture on how to handle wild life.

I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t panic. I simply handled the situation with precise, efficient, fast movement, as if some part of me had rehearsed this a hundred times before and had simply been waiting for the moment to finally use it.

And underneath the whole encounter, one feeling surfaced the moment the dream came back to me: power and responsibility, arriving together.

I felt this is the meaning of my life. I exist for this.

By the early part of the last century, it no longer existed anywhere in the wild. In Romania, not far from my hometown, a handful of individuals survived in captivity, and the entire future of the species rested on those few. What exists today, herds moving freely again through forests where they had vanished, exists only because people committed, across decades, to bringing it back with patience and care. Nothing about its survival was automatic. It had to be restored, deliberately.

That is not a small detail to me. Strength that has been rebuilt after nearly disappearing does not carry itself the same way as strength that was never tested. It moves differently. It knows exactly how close to gone it once came, and it does not take its own continued existence for granted. What approached me in that bush was not raw, untouched wildness. It was wildness that had already survived near-loss and slow, careful return, the exact kind of strength I have spent years quietly rebuilding in myself.

The Proximity: A Relaxed Readiness

He was not coming for me. He was reaching for rasberries, entirely occupied with his own hunger, and I happened to be standing close enough to touch him. And yet the instant he was that close, I was already moving.

I have thought about this since, and I don’t read it as an overreaction to something harmless. I read it as exactly calibrated. Nothing about my response was anxious or braced for danger, it was relaxed, almost unhurried, even as it was immediate. That is the readiness I mean: not watching from a distance to see what a powerful thing will do before deciding whether to engage, but recognizing that its closeness is itself the information. If something that strong is near enough to touch, it is near enough to matter, and I don’t wait to find out why. I act, because the proximity is the invitation. If it were not mine to meet, it would have stayed further away.

The Horn: Neither Fighting Nor Fleeing

I keep returning to the fact that I did not run, and I did not fight either. I reached for the one place on his body that held the most force, and I simply turned it.

For most of my life, when I met something that powerful, in myself or in someone standing in front of me, I only knew two responses: fight it, or suppress the anger of not being able to free myself from its grip. This dream showed me a third way I didn’t fully trust I had access to, until I watched myself access it in the astral realm: stay close enough to feel the full weight of what is moving, steady enough not to be swept by its size, and precise enough to know exactly where to send it.

Instead of reacting in defense, with an offensive move or by running, I redirected it, with a firm, soft hand that already knew how to hold it.

Strength That Was Never Meant to Stay Private

One detail keeps returning to me more than any other. I was not alone in that clearing, working this out quietly for myself. Even with my hands full, part of me was already reaching outward, making sure someone else understood what was happening and was not left unprepared by it.

I don’t think that was incidental. Recognizing my own strength was never going to be where this ends. It is the doorway into being able to stand next to someone else’s strength – their fury, their hunger, their grief, whatever shape it happens to be wearing –  without flinching from it, and being able to redirect it so they recognize their own wounds and masks, the ones they, too, can eventually let go of.

What Still Asks to Be Trusted

I won’t pretend the dream handed me something finished. In my sleep, the recognition was instant. I acted before I had time to analyze it. Awake, it rarely arrives that cleanly. Or more honestly, I rarely let it. I learned to hold myself back even when the clarity was already there, because my reactions used to come too fast and too sharp, catching people off guard before they had had a chance to brace. Inside hierarchies especially, that got named as a problem, and the feedback was always the same: soften, comply, submit. I never actually accepted that verdict. But I did repress myself against it, far enough that I came to fear my own combustion.

So what the dream seems to be showing me is that I have chiselled at this long enough to now know how to modulate the response itself, landing it with force when force is what is needed, or with gentleness when gentleness is, while staying true to myself and inclusive of whoever is standing in front of me, either way.

What This Dream Taught Me About Strength

I have spent years building the capacity this dream finally showed me in full. And what it confirmed, more than anything else, is this:

The years of learning to sit with anger instead of letting it burn me were not wasted time, they were the training ground. The instant, wordless response was not a fluke, it was decades of slower recognition, finally compressed into a single motion.

The zimbru was not a threat to survive, it was a mirror, showing me exactly how far my own rebuilding has come. I no longer need to brace for a fight, or shrink myself smaller than I am to make the other one feel better about themselves, small enough to stop being a threat, small enough to be tolerated, small enough to disappear. I have learned how to redirect.

The strength I once had to slowly, carefully rebuild in myself is now something I can recognize instantly in others, in whatever intensity it is wearing, however disguised it looks. And what I have learned to do with my own no longer stops at me. It becomes something I can offer: staying close enough to someone else’s power to help them find where to turn it, rather than overpowering them with my own, or shrinking myself to invisible just to be tolerated.