First:
Was in a run-down tree house in an over-grown backyard.
The space had light filtering through the dusty windows, spilling onto the warped wooden interior & tinting everything a warm ocher. Ancient wooden furniture and tattered papers littered the dirty floor. It appeared no one had been there for quite some time.
I exited the building, and as I mounted the wooden ladder and began my descent a great blue-gray eagle swooped down, its long wing feathers grazing my arms. I turned to watch and saw that he was in pursuit of a blue jay, its shrill calls obnoxious and piercing.
The eagle opened his great beak and I saw his tongue was forked. He flew gracefully into range and snapped his jaws shut on the jay's torso, severing it perfectly in half.
I finished my descent & proceeded to gather the feathers of the dead bird as the eagle watched from the branches of a near-by oak.
Second:
Was standing at the fence that bordered the property of my high school and the adjacent church's back parking lot. (I used to park there, just off of school grounds.) I was looking down at the mess of leaves and branches that collected along the fence and spotted a bright blue feather.
When I bent to pick it up, I found an entire blue jay wing in the leaves.
I began to pluck the flight feathers one-by-one, inspecting each closely before moving on to the next. The feathers gradually turned from blue with black stripes to red with solid black markings. Towards the end of the wing (the side closer to the body), the feathers were from an entirely different bird. I know I have dreamed of these very particularly-marked feathers before, but do not know what bird they are from (see: "Honoring the Owl"). The last feather remaining was growing in backwards. When I pulled it out, I saw that the black surface was dotted with hundreds of tiny red eyes.
I began rummaging through the leaves to find the rest of the bird. At some point, I found a severed head buried under the leaves.
The face was most definitely that of a man (I could feel the stubble on his face), his skin a sickly gray. His flesh was still very pliable, and I parted his lips to inspect his teeth. Each tooth had small buds on the ends, and when I scraped away the thin layer of flesh covering the buds, feathers emerged.
I gathered these feathers and left.
