Coyote

This dream has really disturbed me. I still feel out of sorts.

I dreamed that I was walking home in a pair of cheap pink flip-flops (I own these as pool shower shoes). I was walking through the woods and was annoyed with myself for wearing flip-flops because they were already hurting my feet and there was still a long way to go.

In my peripheral vision, I noticed a gray coyote walking on my left side. It startled me, but I wasn't scared because they're usually so skittish. I walked a bit more, then turned suddenly and made a loud noise, clapping my hands and shouting so as to scare him off. He flinched, but didn't run away. He just kept walking on my left, about 10 feet away.

I tried to ignore him, but he kept getting closer and closer. I wasn't sure if he had malicious intentions, or if he just wanted to play. Whenever I would look over at him, he would kind of grin by opening his mouth a bit. I couldn't tell if it was evil or not.

Finally, I thought I'd try to get him to chase a stick and while he was away, I'd figure out a way to escape (by this point, I definitely wanted to get away). I broke a stick off a log lying on the ground. I kind of showed it to him and then threw it as hard as I could. The coyote watched it fly away, but he didn't chase it. He just watched it fall. While he was watching it fall, I bent down and picked up another stick, one with a big knobby lump on the end. I carried it by my right side, parallel to my leg so he couldn't really see it.

By this point, everything was very weird and disturbing. The coyote was standing on his back legs, walking upright. I realized that I had to pretend that everything was good and fun, so I was laughing and grinning at him. We ended up holding hands and skipping along together, laughing, while I desperately tried to plan how to get away.

Finally, I decided that he couldn't come to my house. I knew he was plotting something scary and I couldn't get him to go away. I decided to hit him with the knobby stick and knock him unconscious. I took a big swing, but just as I did, he turned his head to look at something and I missed. I was so scared that he would notice that I had tried to hurt him. I was still pretending that I was happily skipping along with him.

Finally, I tried again, using our clasped hands as a pivot point to get more force. This time I hit him on the front of the head. I realized, though, that my stick wasn't heavy enough to knock him out for long, so I kept beating at his head until I knew he was dead.