Patricia - Your mind and your body are not separate things, so what you see in your dreams/your mind of course are felt in your body. So whatever you feel, fear or imagine deep within you effects your health and wellbeing. That is why dreams are so important, for they are a reflection of the very deeps of you.
Your dream says that you have been working on cultivating your inner life and allowing yourself to grow. But you fell twice - you had two setbacks, but easily recovered.
Example: In every human being, I seemed to be told, there is a fire that burns, a creative fire. When that fire is permitted to burn freely, the human being is healthy and creative, whether he be farmer, artist, mother, workman. But when the fire is blocked, as it is by this pain or fear, then the person is crippled, just as I had been crippled for most of my life.
Then you found a greater flow of life within you - the clear stream - in fact a feeling of being in a good place in your life. But a greater flow of life, your life energy, cannot help you to meet the consequences of your growth and work on yourself/garden. For you faced the fear of death - the crocodiles/alligators. But to get to the ‘other garden’ you must cross the stream by facing your fear of death. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/the-archetype-of-death/Dream images are only pictures of what you feel or fear. Thus your fear of death was shown as alligators biting you - and that fear cannot help but be felt in your body. Whenever we dream its images are not like real life. because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.
So feel your fear instead of waking up from it and so pass through the fear into real growth in the heavenly garden - we have to cross the stream/river to cross to the other side, death.
So imagine yourself as the alligator or crocodile by using -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPersonTony