Last night I dreamed of alligators and cows. I was in a field full of alligators and cows and was making my way towards an old barn or a house. I was moving carefully because I did not want to spook either the cows or the alligators. Eventually I made it to the old house and crept inside. Waiting for me was a giant albino alligator. It eyed me lazily and shuffled towards me. I tried to go back outside but there was a pissed off cow out there that wanted to spear me with its horn. So I ended up having to slither into a cramped secret passage. The giant albino alligator tried to follow me but eventually gave up.
From an online dream dictionary:
To see a cow in your dream, signifies your obedience to authority without question. It symbolizes your passive and docile nature. Alternatively, it represents maternal instincts or the desire to be cared for.
To see an alligator in your dream, symbolizes treachery, deceit, and hidden instincts. It may be a signal for you to take a new perspective on a situation. It may also represent your ability to move between the material world of waking life and the emotional, repressed world of the unconscious. Alternatively, the alligator represents healing powers and qualities.
To dream that you are running away from the alligator, indicates that you are unwilling to confront some painful and disturbing aspect of your unconscious. There is some potentially destructive emotion that you are refusing to acknowledge and owning up to.
Hmm...
After work yesterday I pedaled around Sanford on my bike until the sunlight failed. I tried to find a road that circles the Airport that I saw on google maps, however when I arrived at it, it was fenced off and barb-wired. Guess they do not want anyone wandering around in there. I suppose that is why it was named ’Patrol Road’. A trashy house sat next to the fence and a bedraggled old junkyard dog barked its outrage at me. I smirked at it and squeak-squeak pedaled away.
Indecently, I love my bike, it is a big cruiser bike with only one speed and once you pick up a little steam you can pedal on endlessly effortlessly at a decent speed, however it is a real pain when it comes to crossing a four lane highway. There is no hop on and zip across the lane because there is only one rather low gear. Instead I have to wait for a gap in traffic, hop on, and sort of push off with my tippy-toes to get a little speed and then then give the pedals a few might pumps, all the while looking fearfully around me because I just know some yokel cranked up on meth is going to explode around some previously unseen corner and flatten me.
So I pedaled back home weaving in and out of the little neighborhoods. I like to smell the houses I am riding past. In the evening I can catch the scent of dinners being made coming from each of the houses that I past. Every smell is different with its own texture. It is a combination of the dinner being made and simply how their houses smell. I imagine that is how a dog feels when it is riding in a car with its nose out the window.
A good bike ride drains some of the irritability I have been feeling the past few days.
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal machine to March 17, 2008, where Ed is dodging dream gators and sniffing driveways like a suburban bloodhound.
Ah, 2008 Ed, you magnificent simpleton. You consulted an online dream dictionary, the dial-up oracle of its day, and took it seriously enough to copy-paste its vapid paragraphs into your blog. Now we open an app and get instant dream interpretation from a machine that also writes poetry about cheese; we've traded one kind of nonsense for another. You also tried to circle an airport based on Google Maps, only to find barbed wire and a junkyard dog. That's the whole internet in miniature: promise of total knowledge, reality of a fence. And your beloved one-speed cruiser, strictly for lazy neighborhood loops, but helpless on a four-lane highway. Now the streets are full of e-bikes that hum like vengeful hornets, and instead of smelling dinners, everyone is looking down at a glowing rectangle, afraid of missing an imaginary like. You feared a meth-cranked yokel flattening you; we fear silent electric vehicles sneaking up on us. At least you had the decency to smell other people's homes and call it a dog's joy. Modern folk just get a DoorDash notification and call it an adventure.
“2008 Ed, why did you trust an online dream dictionary to explain your subconscious when your real evidence was right there: a bike, some barbed wire, and one very judgmental dog? Did you ever stop to think the alligator was just your own stubbornness about not crossing that four-lane highway?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, that's a fair question, and about what I deserve for trusting anything the internet tells me past noon. The dream dictionary was just there, glowing in my little office, and it made my weird alligator-and-cow brain feel like it meant something, which is more than my own head usually offers. But yeah, you're probably right. The real evidence was sitting there all along: me, squinting at barbed wire, a dog yelling at me, and a road I wasn't allowed to cross. Maybe the giant albino alligator was just my own stubbornness in a scaly costume, waiting for me to stop tippy-toe-pumping and commit to the gap in traffic. And the cow? Probably my job. Anyway, I'm going back to smelling dinner smoke and pretending I'm a dog in a car, because that makes more sense than any of this.
