The Challenger

sketch of alligator from dream

Once again I dream of alligators...many years later. One of the first dreams I wrote of here and the last I left before I left this space....holding a place for me to come back.

I have a friend who read my blog this year and has continued to encourage me to write. For longer than I should have abandoned something I enjoyed, I find that I return with more of a need, or desire, or want than just pure enjoyment of writing. I feel a need to express, and which exemplified itself in recent dreams. I read in Spirits of the Earth, A Guide to Native American Symbols, Stories  and Ceremonies, by Bobby Lake- an alligator is a sign of a "challenger"

The scene is the back of a house on the outside of the fence to the yard and I am looking up at the back porch. Everything around me is murky brown save for the lone light bulb hanging heavy with moths flitting back and forth against its glow. I am physically on the outside of the fence and I put one eye to a hole in the wood and like miraculous vision I can see the whole yard. It's filled with water. Water is an element I often dream about in so many forms. It accompanies me to work out the depths of my inner dialogue.

So here I am in this scenario. In a yard filled with swampy water. I feel his heavy presence. This alligator has been waiting on me, a sense I pick up on within this dream.

I have to cross a yard filled with water. If you can imagine filling your backyard with water then you would imagine it filled with grass, leaves and the opaque color of dirt. It's filthy and he's lurking in the corner. I have to get to my mom for some reason. It's not apparent in this dream but it's necessary. I look to the lit up porch once more and I can hear faint music and talking. No one knows I am here, facing this challenge.

Like the game of Pacman, if I swim the alligator moves slowly towards my direction. I freeze. He stops, turns his eye in my direction. We keep up this game of cat and mouse, inch by inch. I can feel my heart pounding. I wonder after I wake if it was actually rapid in my sleep state.

My last approach is to jump up on the porch, which will cause commotion. The risk; Stay where I am temporarily safe, but with mounting pressure, or leap to something calling me, not sure what it's about, only that it's necessary.

The challenger. I take the risk. I leap to the porch and as in a cliché movie scene, I jump and the alligators snaps, clamping down hard on its own teeth. He fails to connect falling back to the murky water and I make it to the porch. People rush out at the sudden noise and grab my arms. I wake suddenly. Not necessarily at peace, but moody about the alligator and water symbol. They won't leave me alone. Alligator and Water. Challenger and Change. I'm am wrestling with these two and I will have to seek them out and face them now.

alligators

I walk into what resembles a mansion-stark white walls, ceilings high-though I never look up.

This place is like being on the inside of a cube with the walls cutout in many perfect rectangles.

I am walking along narrow pathways that lead between the doorways, the bottom of the cube floor missing; and moving below cerulean blue water. The marine blue is a brilliant contrast against the immaculate, chalk white walls.

I am shocked when a flash of grass green leaps from the water and I hear a significant snap sound. I look at my bare feet and a baby alligator is slipping back into the water. I notice then these narrow pathways are tested by alligators ranging in size and shades of green. I continue walking though consciously aware of my balance-the tiny alligators continue to leap and fall from the surface of the water, as the larger, more powerful continue to stew below. I stop cold, eyes on the end of the path, but my body at the beginning.

Form

 I love pondering over dreams, partly because my dreams are often wild and fantastic, and telling. Life floods the mind with a wide spectrum of wondering and emotion, and this consciousness also stirs within the concoction of my night dreams. I go inward alot. I think I may spend most my time there, so when I express myself in writing it's like I have been jolted out of a sleep. Dreams become a foggy haze of a place to be explored- and now, in this same hazy place, a creative and passionate being  hidden in slumber has been found and shaken to awake and asked to take form.

The Variable String

I often wonder about dreams.
I've read through dream books that provide insight and meaning to the mystery of dreams during sleep, like for flying ones or ones with unending rooms in a house, or the repetitive dream. The repetitive one is the biggest mystery to me-at least the one I had when I was a child.
However, in this blog I would like to go further with my dreams and document the variable string that attaches my dreaming state to my waking life. I know there is the understanding that our daily life affects the images and material that become our dreams, where when we fall to sleep the soul works through the brain by use of the self conscious.
But have you ever come up with an invention in your sleep? Have you ever fallen in love or swam across the ocean or suddenly knew how to play piano? Have you ever waken and made it a must to explore your dreams...literally? Maybe our dreams are not only about working through what is going on in our lives presently, but cris-crossing through our life-past, present, and future- and presenting our deep, authentic self as well. Maybe our dreams uniquely show some of our wants and desires while sleeping, as if to say, something in this dream could be the beginning to a waking dream~lived out loud.