Blue_Opossum

Morning of August 12, 1979. Sunday.



In my dream, I am walking southward in a grassy area near a large stream with very high banks. I seem to be in Veteran’s Memorial Park in West Salem, Wisconsin. Floating in the stream in the same direction I am walking is a large grayish and mossy-green alligator with unnaturally large yellowish-orange eyes which are also somewhat dome-like. Eventually, a laser beam slowly emerges from its left eye and starts moving towards me, but also slowly sweeping the area. Several unfamiliar people who were in different areas along the edge of the bank are now either running or cautiously walking from the area. This “laser” seems to be the only way that the alligator is able to find people, though it does not swim or attempt to leave the stream yet or attack at any point. It seems threatening but it is not a direct threat. It remains slowly moving from behind me to my right. As I eventually wake I see a beautifully rendered image of sunrise.

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Resupplemented on Thursday, 31 August 2017.

Hypnagogic foundation: I do not really feel like waking up and getting out of bed yet. As with many of my dreams, the essence of water is focused upon due to the fact that water symbolizes sleep (partly based on the fact that the first nine months of life are spent sleeping in the water of the womb) and the real-time dynamics of sleep while in the dream state (possibly due to subliminal awareness of the flow of glymphatic fluid increasing during sleep). I had focused on the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying.”

Hypnopompic resolution: Sunrise is inevitable. Waking is a necessity.

A similar but shorter version of this dream (with a fatter alligator and a head of a more surreal appearance) occurred on August 8th. Apparently, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was released on August 8th in America in 1966 (which is not possible to confirm as either postcognition or a typical unconscious marker though it is more likely I saw the date somewhere years ago).

The unusual detail of the overly large eyes symbolizes the subliminal awareness of being in REM sleep.

The alligator does not emerge from the stream due to my subliminal attention to being in the dream state. The alligator floating downstream represents my emergent consciousness precursor remaining asleep.

Additionally, the alligator is also based on potentially aggressive coalescence waking symbolism, where a dream character, including the dream self, is swallowed or perceived as being swallowed back into whole consciousness as neural energy increases in the waking transition.

The laser from the alligator’s eye is a distorted rendering of daylight being perceived through my eyelids while slowly waking. The sunrise imagery in the final scene confirms this.

Waking symbolism is often oriented to the right, which is the case with this dream. There are many possible reasons for this, which are too numerous to get into here.

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