Reptile And Robot

20150810 Dream

This dream is very complex and confusing. It appears to take place in a kind of composite of the backyard of the house I grew up in and the backyard of my aunt's house that wasn't too far away from where I lived.

When I first become aware in the dream, I am roaming the property with some dogs. I'm not sure how many dogs. Two I know from my youth but there are other dogs here too. At the far left-hand of the property facing away from the house is a stream or or creek of some kind. There is an aligator sleeping in it.

For some reason, I am not afraid of the sleeping aligator at this poin. There are two dogs sleeping under a tree about ten to twenty feet from the creek. One of the dogs that I knew when I was younger follows me on the property as I am doing whatever chore I am doing.

I come back to the creek area later and the alligator and the dogs are still asleep but then I notice the alligator stir. I call to the dogs to come to the house. In my mind, I am aware that alligators can move up to 60 miles an hour on land. This one is moving slowly enough and while I am in a heightened state of alertness in case I have to rescue any of the dogs, I am still thinking about how ancient the alligator is, that it is a living dinosaur. But about halfway to the house the hole dream shifts to an episode of Last in Space as the alligator changes into the Robot from that show.

In many ways, the Robot is more dangerous than the alligator because the Robot is mad. It can think, unlike the alligator that only seeks to quell its appetites. As I get the dogs to the house, it is actually a spaceship, much larger than the Jupiter 2 from the TV show, and there is a security area.

I suddenly know in the dream logic that everyone knows the Robot is mad and we have made a security entrance that we don't believe the Robot can get past. I get the dogs inside but I hear the ripping up of the security apparatus. Prior to going into the main living quarters of the ship, there is a large warehouse type area filled with all kinds of things the savvy space traveler might need. Mostly crated up in boxes and stacked high until needed.

I go into the main house to warn everyone that the Robot has broken through the security but nobody thinks the Robot can get past the main door and they don't really care or try to help me in any way. I try to get all the dogs into the main living area but they are scattered around the crates.

By now the Robot has broken in and is heading down one of the aisles. I think I have a chance to stop it if I can get behind it. I do and grab it from behind and pull it backward so that if its weapons discharge they will go up and not risk damaging the main living area. I think I then pull the power pack from the Robot but as I wake up, I think about the Robinsons traveling through space with a mad Robot. I think maybe this is why many of the aliens they encountered where hostile How did they introduce the Robot to the new beings they met? “Hello, we are the Robinson family from planet earth and this is our mad Robot who once tried to kill all of us while we were in stasis.”

Also, after thinking about this dream for a while, I was struck by the dichotomy of the threats. That this dream stretched all the way back to the dawn of time all the way to the space age. In a sense, I shouldn't be surprised. This is the programming I grew up with. Planet of the Apes, Lost in Space, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: All of these entertainments at one time or another warned both of devolving back into the primitive and at the same time offered dire warnings of the bright and shining future offered by science and technology. What, exactly was I being programmed for?

I think this is even more insidious than the common religious programming or the familial programming I received growing up because religion and family were treated seriously while this stuff was treated as entertainment and nobody really monitored or tried to decode it. So baby-sitter television kept me quiet for hours at a time and the unchecked programming just seeped in.