The Crocodile Goes Long

My (non-erotic) dreams are usually one of four types, which I equate to weather conditions:

• Heavy haze: A completely unintelligible morasse of images and noise, and includes people who I know, but who do not look like themselves. Usually hard to see, and hard to communicate effectively.
• Short, with clearing periods: Tiny dream snippets of exceptional interest & clarity, that often end prematurely.
• Cloudy, with showers looming: The bog standard "frustration" dream. Usually where I can't get away from someone, or am going all-out ninja on some foe with fists and feet, and he just keeps getting up, unharmed to come at me again. These dreams never seem like any mortal danger, just a frustrating inability to end the confrontation.
• Hot, Humid & Uncomfortable: The fear dream that usually constitutes me being somewhere important that I am completely unprepared for. Often a university exam, whereby I think I can get through it with a bare passing mark if I bs enough, only to read the first question and realize I am utterly screwed.

Last nights dream was remarkable for being long, remarkably linear, and completely inane.

I was at some camp or retreat, whereby there were wooden bunk style cabins, and a collection of people whom I didn't know. The location was a kind of swampy area, with a long brown dirt clearing, and rushy reeds, marshes and hanging mangrove-like swamp trees winding around the edges. Somehow, I got involved in a pick-up game of what I was told was American Football.

But this football game involved very little of the rules of true gridiron. Primarily, the ball was dished out to a player who just tried to run to the other end of the dirt clearing without getting tackled. No real line of scrimmage or forward passing or even positions. It just seems like some backyard game a bunch of boys would play. Even more curiously, the 'ball' was a cricket ball.

But once my team took the lead (in true dream fashion, all my team's points were scored by me, because what's the point of dreams where you aren't the star?), our opposition introduced a new offensive tactic: a crocodile.

They basically tossed the ball into the mouth of this 12-foot salt water croc, which would then scamper to the right and into the swamp. At this point, our team, somewhat dismayed, would lose sight of the mighty reptile, just occasionally seeing the reeds bend, or a tell-tale splash as the beast swam up the right flank. The crocodile would then re-appear somewhere behind us, and then scurry into some unclearly defined end-zone. He would then drop the ball and trot back to his teammates to celebrate. WTF?

We would then make our comeback, and the croc would bring them back. Perhaps this is just a varient of my "cloudy with showers looming" kind of dream?

We had to come up with a tactic, and then I saw it. The croc never settled the red-leather ball into its mouth until it was about to submerge, having a loose open mouthed grip on it until the last minute. So our valiant team organized themselves with a plan. We rushed the beast as soon as the ball was thrown to him, catching the four-legged outside-back unprepared. The beast dropped the ball in it's surprise, and I took possession and ran the length to score.

The dream ended before the awards ceremony, so I have no idea if the croc got "Player of the Match", or just ate us all in frustration.