wack alligator nightmare

 zach and i have been talking recently about how our house will be small with a doglet. So I had a dream last night that we were house shopping in a neighborhood built on a small lake, where all of the houses were connected by boardwalks instead of sidewalks. We were standing outside on the boardwalk looking up at a wooden house that was small, but had an awesome 2nd floor balcony overlooking the lake. This house was kind of off by itself, and the boardwalk running by it only continued 20 more feet or so and dead ended at the water like the end of a pier. The boardwalk beyond the house was in disrepair and sinking into the water, and I noticed there was an alligator taking advantage of this to get up on the boardwalk to catch fish.

I wasn't too worried about it- the alligator was kind of close to us, but it seemed confined to just jumping up onto the sunken part of the boardwalk and back down like it was on a leash, so I figured that if we didn't walk over there it wouldn't bother us. So I continued to admire the house and its second floor balcony from where I was, but Zach decided that he wanted to get a better look. 

I told him not to go over there because of the alligator, but he didn't listen to me. Right when he got to the sunken part of the boardwalk, the alligator jumped up and started nipping at him, still kind of like it was on a leash. I was frozen with panic. He backed up against a railing, but the alligator kept coming closer and closer, so he started sliding along the railing back the way he came, until suddenly the railing stopped and he fell backwards into the water behind him.

At that point the alligator broke free of its invisible leash and lunged over the boardwalk into the water on the other side, where Zach was. To my dismay, I realized that instead of trying to get out and climb up onto the boardwalk on the other side, Zach was playing dead and floating in the water, and the alligator was approaching him. My reaction to seeing this could be described as SMH, with anger. 

Now I had an agonizing decision. Jump in the water and try to save Zach, risking the life of my unborn child, or do nothing and lose Zach? Ultimately my brain couldn't make that kind of decision, and I promptly woke up. That dream hurt. 

I soon fell back asleep, and dreamed that I was missing an old shoe, and decided to go back to WT Woodson High School to see if it was still in my locker, 15 years later. The school had changed a lot- it had been fully renovated and there were high end luxury shops in the hallways. I finally did manage to find what I thought was my old locker, but realized that I couldn't remember the locker combination. Sooo failed mission, I never got my old shoe back. I guess after that first dream my brain had to bring the intensity down a little bit...