Friday Flashback: Fear of Crocodile

This flashback was prompted by Nancy's post, in which Rachel wakes up with nightmares in which she is chased by crocodiles and other beasts.

When I was very young, our family went to the movies in town. Now, this was a rare event back then. We had a radio, but this was before the time of television (even black and white television). While we listened to radio dramas nearly every day, a trip into the movies was a once-a-year event, at most.

For days (nights?) after the movie, I would awake, terrified, with a crocodile chasing me. It wasn't just any crocodile, and it wasn't crocodiles, plural, either. It was The Crocodile. You know, the one that swallowed the alarm clock. The movie we had seen was Peter Pan.

Looking back, I imagine it must have been my subconscious mind hearing the kitchen clock that triggered the episodes.

The movie was released February 5, 1953, and I imagine that it would have taken a few months to make it to our small town. Too bad the archives of the Taber Times aren't available on-line. If they were I could narrow the time of this flashback down to an interval of a few weeks (the typical run of a movie at the Tower Theatre). In any case, I was at least a year older than Rachel at the time.

I don't remember my parents coming up with any creative ideas for dealing with this, so I suppose the nightmares must have just faded away, as I traveled through time at the usual rate of one second per second.