Dinosaur Dreams

  Last night I had another set of unusual dreams, most likely set off by stretching very late last night and releasing some old tensions.
   The first of the dreams involved dinosaurs, specifically running from and avoiding dinosaurs. I haven't spent time looking at or considering dinosaurs recently so it not a product of outside influence. Yesterday was a good day so terrified running was unlikely caused by any emotional fallout from life.
    The real source then must be the opening stretches., specifically the ones opening the hips. There is a pose in yoga called fixed firm, which involves kneeling and sitting between your heels, you then stretch out backwards on the ground. This is a difficult pose for me because of the hard floor on my knees and I spend most of the time when I go to class just trying to get my knees comfortable in this pose. Last night I did the pose on the bed (which incidentally is not recommended) and this allowed me to relax further into the pose without my knees protesting. This in turn opened up some areas of the pelvis. The pelvis is where much of early childhood armouring is stored, at least up to the age of 7. We are learning to walk, gaining control of our elimination systems and getting the hang of basically being upright all the time.
    When I was young I had a love of dinosaurs. I would collect the little plastic toys, pose them in fights and place small items in their fixed open mouths and imagine being around in dinosaur times. I was terribly disappointed when I discovered that man did not exist at the same time and that my dream of becoming a dinosaur scientist would only ever involve dusting off bones. I am not quite sure what I envisioned a dinosaur scientist would do, but it certainly seemed more exciting than the duties of a paleontologist. My walls were adorned with posters of fearsome T-rexes, Pteradactyls, Stegosauruses and Diplodoci(?) Most of the posters were pretty gruesome and a few may have had the carnivorous ones devouring the bodies of the less fortune leaf eaters.
    I don't recall the content of the dreams, but I do recall my parents telling me I would have constant nightmares about dinosaurs and they thought that if I took the posters down it might help. I, of course wanted no such thing, nightmares or not. I loved the dinosaurs regardless of whether they terrified me or devoured me in my dreams.
   I periodically have dreams with dinosaurs in them and they usually have the same kind of quality a Jurassic Park style running for survival. The connection to my childhood cannot be overlooked. I cannot access what caused me to have such terrifying nightmares, but as an adult I do not it is not likely it was not the posters. The symbolism of the dreams suggest running for survival from something much bigger, deadlier and fearsome than myself. Something that cannot be reasoned with, nor safely confronted...something beyond my scope to deal with. As a child one could imagine that the world must seem like that at times, as if one is confronted by fearsome forces that threaten our very survival and that as a child there is no way to deal with this without outside help.
    It is possible that there may well have been elements in my life at that time that felt very much like that. It is likely an encroachment from the adult world. I know my parents were young and worked very hard to support my sister and I, and the awareness of the danger of our situation may have imprinted itself on my young mind. As a youngster, my psyche may well have projected these fears onto other elements that appeared fearsome, terrifying and without mercy. An element that I was able to understand...dinosaurs. I know that when life seems merciless I have these dreams again. It provides a background of terror to my normal peaceful life, usually so slight as to be imperceptible. That there are elements to life that are still monstrous to me and they are usually connected to the idea of survival.
    The second part of the dream involved a figure so black that he appeared as a hole in which all light disappeared. Shadow is not strong enough to describe his essence and there was a feeling of foreboding about him. The context was a slideshow of images flashing before my consciousness, usually of houses and families, but I noticed this figure stood in the background, or at a window. It was scary and caused me to wake and there was a sense that his presence still remained. This element I have not fully examined, although it is possible that it is a being of some sort and/or a representation of the blackest part of my own shadow (in the Jungian sense).
    While I speak of dinosaurs and foreboding feelings there was a strange situation I would like to recount. A few years ago when I was living in the southwest of the UK, a friend went for a job interview in Bristol and I accompanied her for morale support. While she was interviewing I went for a walk and ended up at a museum there in the city, I went in primarily to see the Egyptian section. As typical museum style this section was closed for refurbishment and so I ended up looking at the dinosaur bones. The very first exhibit was a skull from a Liopleurodon, this is a massive sea predator was estimated to be over 30 foot in length.

       As I approached the exhibit I began to pick up on the energy of the skull. Usually I only sense energy if I chose to or if the signature is very powerful. There was a palpable sense of malevolence emanating from the skull, an almost malicious glee. I had never considered that these creatures may have been capable of anything but the most rudimentary instincts, but here I could sense this energy coming from the skull. It struck me as unusual that an energy residue would last for such a period of time, but then again I have hardly spent much time around skulls.
      I was intrigued and opened myself up to sensing such things and walked through the rest of the exhibit looking at the other bones. Strangely I felt nothing, all the other bones seemed inert. After I had looked at the rest of the displays I returned and still felt the malevolence from the original skull. With further examination I saw a small plaque by the other displays that stated that all the other "bones" in the displays were plaster replicas and that the only genuine article was the Liopleurodon skull in the display case.
    I am not sure what to think of this, only that these massive beasts may have been the equivalent to mass murdering dolphins and that they may have derived some murderous pleasure from being the greatest hunters of the sea.