Yet another dream post - Killer sloth

[Ja det er Meg]

So, the following nightmare is the only one that has truly frightened me, to the point of waking up, turning on all the lights and sitting safely in the corner with my back against the wall until morning.  I laughed it off as a silly middle school dream for over a decade, until listening to freedomain radio, and the truth it contained became blindingly obvious.  I think it contains parallels for many peoples' childhood.     

 

Dream: 

I am deep in the jungle on some sort of safari, me and my fellow travelers are settling down for the night.   I am up in a tree, observing my surroundings, when I see a sloth off in the distance.  I keep watching it, and notice that it is slowly skinning its own child alive with a knife. It is evil, and its red eyes shoot up and look directly at me, and starts heading in my direction (not at a sloth pace).  I freak out and run to the tour guide leaning against a tree for help. I explain the situation, how we are all in danger and need to get out of here.  The only response I get from him is "Yuuup, they do that" and he continues to lean on the tree with his hat is over his eyes, whittling on a stick.   I try to get the other travelers to take notice, but they don't care.  The sloth arrives and starts murdering people, and a chase through the jungle ensues.  I'm almost caught, and the dream morphs into a city, the urban jungle (like NYC with tall buildings). "The sloth" is now a nickname for a serial killer that slowly skins people alive, and is running rampant in the city. I wake up, and fear that "the sloth" is in my home, waiting it pop up from the foot of my bed and and slowly kill me.   This is when I left the room and turned on all the lights.   

 

My interpretation:

The sloth is obviously my mother(I lived alone with her and my sister.  She moved us almost 4k miles away from all other family and friends), or all destructive mothers.  She was slowly emotionally destroying my sister and I, and everyone just looked the other way. It wasn't their problem.  It also shows how trapped I felt, that even if I ran all the way from a south american jungle to a huge american city, I would never be safe. 

 

I'm so glad to be in a healthy and wonderful environment now, which continually points out how not-normal my childhood was.  

 

Thanks all! 

[cynicist]

Holy shit man, now I'm afraid of going to sleep

But I'm happy that you figured it out. I'm always fascinated at how our brains communicate this stuff to us. Out of curiosity was it a recurring nightmare or a one shot deal?

[AndyTheAnarchist]

Interesting, thanks for sharing! That was large dose of horrific imagination whilst reading the dream illustration, but the correlation between the interpretation and the dream seems to be accurate if you've thought of it to be obvious. Be sure to post more dream interpretations - you're really good at articulating your interpretations into a readable format.