Strange Hotel

This post is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of my dreams:

I was in a strange city, staying in a beautiful hotel.  My room was beautiful, but suddenly I had two roommates.  They were young women, and talkative.  I left the room to get some peace.  I went outside.  My husband and youngest son, Brian were there.  Brian was about twelve.  We all decided to go for a walk to a playground.  The playground was down a long gravel road.  We stopped short because we saw a baby crocodile walking up the road.  There was another animal in the bushes, very large.  In the dream we called it a badger, but I don't know what it was.  To the right were homes, and I heard a mother calling a young child.  I thought, what a dangerous place for children. 

The part that I left out:  When I first entered the room, there was a beautiful young African-American woman on my bed.  She was masturbating.  I shouldn't have left this part out, because I think it says something about vitality.  I was talking about vitality in one of my classes that day.  And, symbolically, sex is vitality. 

Also, I had shown The Power of Myth to my Imaginative Writing class.  Afterwards, my friend Sally and I had talked about mothering by example, showing children how to be compassionate in a world that is sometimes dangerous and cruel.  Sally and I had also talked about vitality.  About participating fully in the world, as Joseph Campbell discusses in Power of Myth.