Alligator Crocodile
Feelings or fears of being attacked or overwhelmed, possibly from within oneself, or by a powerful mother – i.e. ones internal dependence upon mother. There is so much about ourselves we do not know, and when a new aspect of us, or a much larger power within us emerges – like and great creature from our depths – we react to it with fear. See Autonomous complex
The alligator and crocodile often represent a hidden form of treachery, apparently harmless until it opens its mouth to eat us, such as that of a person spreading malicious rumours or trying to undermine us in some way. Another attack from deep within can be from repressed emotions.
But the alligator or crocodile as a dream creature is not the same as an external alligator. It is an enormous creature from your own depths, your inner self or core self – the part of you that you are not aware of and are frightened of. See core
The alligator or crocodile is similar to the serpent and depicts the power of the emotions, influences and experiences emerging from the unconscious. If you do not relate to your unconscious urges constructively, conflict can occur. Then you may feel fear of these forces within you – fear of being swallowed, or dragged into dark feelings. That is, of being carried away, or possessed, by fears, urges, ideas, arising from within, or fear of the irrational.
The Egyptians worshipped a crocodile as a guide to the dead in the underworld. It represents not only a threat, but also a wealth of wisdom about unconscious things. It possibly represented the forces of the unconscious because of the observation of the crocodile emerging from hidden depths to lay its eggs on the river bank. In this sense the crocodile or alligator in some dreams represents a personal confrontation with eternity. Depending upon the dream, the crocodile may well depict your fears about your inner hugeness. When we meet this it shows a personal awareness of merging with the many lives held in the collective unconscious. It is illustrated by the Christian idea of being cells in the body of Christ. We retain individual life, but know ourselves as part of an eternal life. This is possibly a natural stage in ageing, as our physical prowess and motivations fall away, this immense inner life begins to open to us. See The Life Will
As some people keep pet alligators, there might be a very personal meaning if one has actually kept an alligator.
Example: Now I looked at the large pool where the river surfaced. A woman swam in it, and was going to enter the tunnels. As I watched I saw some huge crocodiles swim toward her. With great speed and confidence she swam away, obviously being able to match the threat. A group of people in the pond, through their group strength, also dealt with the crocodiles.
Example: I can remember that in the dream another person and I, a male but very indistinct and shadowy, were facing mythical creatures in some sort of odyssey. A strange sort of crocodile or alligator type creature was supposedly attacking me. I had mixed feelings about this. Partly I felt there was nothing to fear about the creature, but another feeling was that it might be able to do some damage. In fact it was biting me across my chest, but all I felt was a very strong tickling feeling that made me laugh.
Example: Now a huge unknown creature began to enter into my awareness. I felt the presence of an enormous creature rising to the surface of something like a swamp or a body of water. At first I thought it might be a whale, but as I paid attention to what was happening it defined into a huge crocodile.
This huge creature looked at me and said, “Mathew, join me.”
I laughed at this because it was so huge, and with so many associations of swallowing things, that I said something like, “What do you mean join you? Don’t you mean that you want to eat me?”
The creature replied to me, “No. No, it’s not like that, I’m just like a submarine. I have all these lives in me. I have many, many lives in me. I am life. I contain the many. You can swim this ocean alone Mathew, if you wish. Or you can join me, you can join the many. You can always, if you choose to live your independent life again and leave us.”
I laughed here because I had the image of me being independent, stripping off, diving over the side of the boat into the ocean and swimming off. It is something I have often done in the sea, swimming long distances alone, or off to an island out to sea, by myself.
I began to give myself to that great creature which I now understood as the collective unconscious, the unity of lives. It felt as if it was absolving me, much as I had experienced earlier on. (One of those strange and beautiful, and also moving coincidences just happened. I am reading this in using voice recognition, and it is proving to be very accurate. But in the sentence where I said that I felt it was – and the word was supposed to be absorbing me – the software used the word absolving. And here I am again, back in the ocean, weeping as I know there is no judgment on the life I have led so alone and cut off.)
Useful questions and hints:
What does the alligator represent to me?
What do I know about them?
Am I feeling threatened or carried away by any fears?
In what way is my intuition or awareness reaching beyond myself ?
Do I feel myself part of a larger whole?
See See Summming Up – Reaction to the unconscious – Secrets of Power Dreaming
Comments
Hello Tony
I came across your website because I had a very vivid and mysterious dream involving crocodiles. I’d appreciate it if you could help me work through it.
At first, the dream happens inside a house, all white, whose decorations evoke the 80’s. There is a sense of there being a family who’s happy and stable but they don’t appear, except for the husband and father who’s around 50. He starts behaving strangely after a mysterious event which upsets the family dynamic. It reminds me of those old movies of possession by alien forces, etc.. He starts replacing decorating objects in the house with menacing and mysterious crocodile figurines, all around the house. His eyes look green and impersonal, like those of reptiles and his expression looks frozen/fixed. The dream then cuts to a body of water, apparently the ocean, on which there is a huge steel structure, open on one of the sides, and there is huge black tentacled monster sitting on it, which does not terrify me, but elicits an odd organic feeling of primitivity coupled with mystery but also of some sort of resolution – as if this is what it is, life in all its preverbal strangeness.. There is also a sense that this monster is connected with the man and the house through the crocodile figurines!
Thank you for your time!
Cheers
Dan
I have been having several dreams lately with Aligators. My last one I was just going down a narrow river on a small boat with one of my children. I only recall that I knew there were aligators but I had no fear. I felt like my thing was to find them and show whom was with me that I was not afraid. I was not afraid at all. What does this dream mean? Just curious.
What does it mean when I dreamed that my
deceased father is attacked by an alligator?
There was two alligators and both of them tried to hurt people in the dream including myself, but I had no fear of them. i walked somewhere and came back and I saw that they ate the people as there tmmies was bulging. I ran up to the alligators and a struggle persuad as I tried to rap clothing around there mouths my one hand got caught for a few seconds in the jaw but the alligator could not bite down to hurt me. A knife was lying there and I stabbed its tummy over and over and stuff came out looking like the yolk of an egg
In 1998 I was at a Reiki retreat in Key West Fl. and found your book in a used book store it given me wonderful insight. Thank you for all you bring to me.
I was being chased by the head of a crocodile. It was a weak head, the jaw was loose, it looked pale, and I wasn’t too afraid but tried killing the bodyless crocodile head with a stick as it chased me and its weak jaw snapped at me. I lost sight of it eventually and then I thought I saw a huge rollie pollie but discovered it was actually a rat. I wasn’t afraid but I tired to scare it away. What does this mean?
Senia – Dreams are all your own creation, your feelings put into images. So you could have done anything you liked with the crocodile head – made it into a lover man or even a pet dog. The art of dreaming is not to try to scare your feelings away, but to face them and transform them.
See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/#Virtual and http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/#Reflect
Tony
my daughter dreamt she is in a huge mansion – there are many crocodiles as pets – they are eating food – they all are pets – & she feels wierd as she has been getting wierd deams. what is the meaning
I dreamt i was walking along a grass area and my sister in law fell into some water and got attacked by a crocodile. people pulled her out but said she was killed and wrapped her in a carpet with her face showing when all if a sudden she jerked awake with crocodile fingers! I said oh this has happened to my sister aswell. It’s been playing on my mind all day and when I look up the meaning it’s saying bad things could happen so getting really anxious. I suffer from bad GAD anxiety so this doesn’t help. I’m wondering If the dream is related to my anxiety and I do have lots of changes on my plate in my personal life too. Can someone help reassure me? Thank you
Hi Tony, I found your blog looking for answers to a dream that the mother of my son has.
She dreamt that our son was at a country village with her, in the village there was a dirty pond, a pet crocodile and a crocodile skin, my son used the skin to play, he used the skin as if he was a crocodile and was happy and playful, but as he was playing the pet crocodile that was in the dirty pond gets out of the water grab my son by the leg and pull him to the water where the crocodile attack him and kill him, his mother gets into the water frantically but our son was already dead, she sees him covered in blood from head to toe, she told me that the nightmare feels terribly real.
Can you please tell us what this dream means and maybe give us some rest, our son is only 5 years old and we love him with all our hearts and this nightmare is keeping us restless.
Thank you.
Worried Father – You didn’t say how old your son is. At a certain age boys start a move toward independence, and often mother’s feel this as a death within them.
But if it is not that then the dream is about your wife. So please read http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/#Project. In which case your wife is terrible anxious about her own inner child and is frightened for its survival.
I cannot answer are length at the moment, so please see http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/your-inner-child/.
Tony
I just had a dream that my daughter fell right in front of a lake and as she did, an alligator came up and started to approach her. I then started moving towards her and the alligator but as I came face to face with the alligator, I woke up? What are your thoughts?
Melissa – There are so many meanings that can be attached to this, but if we stick to the main images we can’t go far wrong.
Also remember that you are not dreaming about your daughter, but the feelings, hopes and the way you see her. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/
Your daughter probably represents the worries you have about your own growing and young self. To clarify this see – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/practical-techniques-for-exploring-your-dreams/#TalkingAs
The lake is easier as it usually represent what lies under the surface of your own mind, and what you meet is an anxiety about being swallowed or attack. But this a dream and you should not mix it with waking life feelings. The alligator feels like threat but it can be a wonderful opportunity to learn more about yourself – what is still not realised and so unconscious. So if you can really come face to face with the alligator without fear it could show you that you are not alone, but are part of the web of Life.
Tony
Had a dream of small alligators in a tank in a shop, they jumped out if the tank to try and bite. They also tried to get my cats, managed to bite ones tail and after managing to somehow get a few in a bag outside trying to keep them out, heard they had eaten some kittens. Never dreamt of alligators before, just trying to attack whenever a chance! No idea what this all means…
Dear Tony. I just wrote to you about a dream I had last night about a snake. I had a dream the night before where I was sitting in a canoe wtih my mother and I think my two boys were with us. My mother leant over to carress something in the water and I screamed at her not to becuase I realised it was a crocodile – she kissed its head like it was the family dog and I kept yelloing at her. The I realised we were surrounded my huge piranas and crocodiles and as I realised that the canoe started to sink and I was frantically pushing them away in panic. Please could you tell me what this means?? Thanks so much Joanna
Joanna – From your dreams you seem to suffer from a lot of anxiety arising from fears.
First I would like you to read http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/ as this will explain that things are not as bad as you imagine them to be.
Crocodiles and snakes can be harmful in waking life, but in dreams they are images such as in computer games or films. They may cause you to feel fear, but it is only created by you. You can see how your fear in the second dream caused your feelings to become greater, and so the canoe started to sink. If you felt confident then the canoe would have remained afloat – the dream is created by your feelings.
If you do suffer from anxiety or panic I suggest you try using the following – http://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-slow-breath/
Tony
Tony – thanks very much for this. really interesting as I am in a place at the moment in life where I need to make a big marital decision – I’m feeling a lot of fear about the future either way and have been kind of paralised by thids for ages and find myself anable to move forward. My dreams have become very powerful and usually involved feeling threatend or having to escape or protect the kids.I will study the link 🙂 Thanks again J
PS & no offense, but Christians being “cells” in Christ’s body is not a Christian/Biblical concept, neither is the idea of “collective consciousness.” That is total “New Age” (House of Theosophy) lies from the same serpent/Devil & his “Ascended Masters” & so called “Guiding Spirits” who are deceiving people into believing the New Age “universal Christ consciousness” is the answer to mankind’s & the world’s woes. Be wise my son & reject Madame Blavatsky & Annie Bessant, etc. deceptions. The Biblical Jesus Christ is everyone’s only hope! Thank you.
FYI: In a string of dreams today, one scene was me walking hurriedly, determined, head down, along the river, clutching two white binders close to me, & I said out loud “Publish!” –Then noticed a man following me, turned & looked at him, did not appear threatening so I kept walking. Then he starts creating commotion, loud, saying something like, “Look here, look here!” So I stop & look & there is an alligator in the grass by river with his mouth wide open with a (green?) snake coiled up sitting inside the alligator’s open jaws! I was not frightened at all, just shook my head at the man creating the commotion, & kept on walking. (Scene changed after that).
I already knew reptiles in general mean lies (frog dream years ago) & the snake/serpent I know is always the Devil (Biblical). But I had never dreamed of an alligator before, nor a snake neither, much less alligator & snake together. The Devil is “the father of lies” (Jesus said in Book of John) & Great Serpent (Genesis & Revelation), yet alligator (lies) has Devil (snake & liar) in his mouth. A double whammy of lies & deception, I suppose! I took it to mean the devil is interfering with my ability to publish (blog) “white truth” (white binders) as much as I’d like… still contemplating full meaning.
BTW, the word alligator is not in the KJV Bible. Crocodile may be, I didn’t check that.
Dreamer – As I understand it, dreams do not come from a thinking mind, and so are not understandable by thinking. And any interpretations I give I admit are from thinking and are only given as a guide for others to learn to go beyond thinking to the spirit that moves us.
So all that you say comes from your thinking from reading what others have thought – not from your own spiritual insight. As it says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”.
Yet you worship the graven words of the Bible – they are engraved and then printed which is a form of creating an image. Surely you should turn to the formless God and worship there. An image in fact that has many faces and is all the thought of men and their interpretations.
Also, if we are all in the Body of Christ, and the body is made of cells, surely we can call ourselves cells in that body – as it says the flesh is not it, but the spirit is. After all, all words or made by men and so are capable of multiple meanings, all of them illusory?
To get at the meaning of your dream, instead of more words, look at http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/
To go beyond words, take away the images in your dream and see what is left – feelings, your own feelings. And do not add thought up interpretations to those pure feelings.
Tony
In my dream I watch a crocodile snatch a little girl from a group of children we ran after it and pulled a small dead crocodile out of the bushes. The big crocodile saw this and then released the girl unharmed. At that time we saw a rhino and giraffe come out of the bushes. What could this mean, I have thought of nothing else today.