I have a dream

Had it three times now, in fact, which is rare since I seldom remember dreams.

In the dream, I'm walking on a sidewalk near a body of water. Sometimes it's the pond on the the golf course behind my house, sometimes it's Lake Wales. Anyway, I'm walking along the sidewalk when I see a gator in the path a few yards ahead of me. Alarmed, I climb a tree (I think a lamppost in one version).

Looking down at the gator, he's seen me and is looking up with his mouth open. He's making some sort of menacing hissy sound, and it's obvious he means to do me harm. He's not especially big, though -- 3-4 feet or so -- which makes my terror all the more ridiculous. I look around, but there's nobody in sight. I'm sure as hell not going to yell "help." I'm a grown man that's climbed a tree to run away from a three-foot gator. That's embarrassing enough; I don't need to summon the entire community in to witness the humiliation. I'm pretty sure I can easily get down and get away from him (true-life fact: gators are fast, but they tire very quickly on land; you can outrun them if you have a head start). But even though I know this, I can't get the nerve up to do it.

"Of course you can outrun me," the gator says, "but you're gonna have to get out of the tree first. Geez, even if I did catch you, I'm only three feet long. Get a good stick and you could probably beat me off if need be."

"Where am I gonna get a stick?"

"You're in a tree, idiot. No, you probably can't break something off from up there, but look, there's a nice thick piece of dead wood right there on the ground. It's probably strong enough for you to whack me with that a few times. But you are going to have to get out of the tree to grab it."

This does seem like a good plan. And the more I look at the gator, I start to think that maybe he's not what he seems.

"Of course I'm not. For one thing, gators don't talk."

Again, he's making sense. Then I look closer, and I start to realize that he's actually one of these.

"A garden gator? You're not even alive?"

"Nope. Ceramic. Don't even have legs."

"So if I climb down from this tree and run away, you won't be able to bite me."

"No guarantees."


And thus the conversation proceeds. I am soon convinced that the gator cannot harm me, and he in fact confirms that I am correct and that he is physically incapable of even moving from the spot on the sidewalk where he has been placed, let alone attacking me. And yet he will not promise not to try. We have long conversations in which we go round and round these same points repeatedly, never really getting anywhere.

Thus, we have a parallel. (And this is real me speaking now, not dreaming-me.) I'm up in the tree, knowing what I could, should do and can do, knowing with a mortal certainty that there is no way that the gator is going to be able to attack ... but I won't do it. The gator, on the other hand, is fully aware that attacking me is a physical impossibility -- he has no legs, his teeth are small and not especially sharp, and since he is in fact only 3 bits of ceramic, his mouth is not actually capable of closing on my leg, let alone exerting any leverage if he did. And yet, though he easily concedes that he can do nothing, he repeatedly refuses to (pardon the lit-speak) relinquish his agency and give me any reassurance that he will do nothing.

(I suppose I should put in here that in my memories of the dreams I don't recall the reason that the gator was considering attacking me anyway, though in the notes I scribbled down after waking one time there is the line "I ate his wife." I suppose that explains it, but in truth he never really seemed personally angry at me, even as he so implacably insisted that he might well attack me should I climb down from the tree. I imagine that if he were here, he'd sensibly point out that as a manifestation of my id, threatening me was pretty much his raison d'etre and the whole wife thing was just a distraction, which is why it was edited out in later drafts. He was logical that way.)

I wish I could end the story with a rousing conclusion, but the truth of the matter is that every single time, the dream has ended with me still up in the tree and the gator still on the sidewalk. I wake up and feel like I just walked out of Waiting for Godot. More accurately, like I just starred in it, I suppose. It's all very unresolved.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that every time I woke from the dream I thought it obvious that the dream was about hiking the AT. And so it gets written down and put here.