Legend Of The Guardian And The Dragon: Bedtime Story

So just take a moment to allow your eyes to close and allow yourself to begin to relax and as you begin to comfortably drift to sleep I'm just going to tell this sleep story in the background and I don't know whether you'll drift to sleep faster to the sound of my voice or whether it'll be to the spaces between my words and as you comfortably drift to sleep you can have a sense of a woman walking through a desert and as she walks through that desert pushing on up sand dunes down the other sides of sand dunes,

Her feet and legs sinking into that sand as she pushes and climbs her way up a sand dune and then sliding and changing her center of balance as she heads down the other side of the sand dune,

Occasionally having to rest one hand down on the sand just to maintain her balance while she descends,

Feeling the heat of that sand,

Of the surface of the sand but noticing that just a little way under the surface as the sand parts under her hand,

She can discover the coolness of that sand and she can feel the heat of the Sun on her face and she has scarves wrapped around her face,

She has a hat on,

Her body covered in clothing to protect her from the Sun overhead and apart from the sounds of her moving and the very slight sound of the grains of sand rubbing across each other in the slightest breeze,

There's no other sound and when she reaches the bottom of a dune and stands still and the remaining sand that was dislodged from her descent slides to a halt,

She can notice that silence,

So silent she can almost hear her heart beating in her chest and she quietly walks through this desert and she thinks that she notices what looks like an area of green land on the horizon but it's on the horizon in a location that she's not heading towards and she wonders if she's off course but she carries on her current course,

Trusting that she's on the right course while also keeping an eye on that green area of land and she watches that green area of land as she continues walking and that green area of land looks so lush and inviting and as she continues to walk seemingly towards the endless desert she wonders if perhaps she is off course and then she notices as she's wondering that in a slight haze that green lush land fades away to reveal further desert as the Sun continues to travel across the sky and she continues to head in the direction of travel that she's planning on going and as that Sun starts to lower over the horizon so she's surprised at how the heat of the day seems to turn so quickly into a coolness of the night with the main warmth being heat radiated up from the sand of the desert and she gets out a special torch and illuminates the area around her as she continues her journey in the dark and the torch makes the occasional scorpion that scampers by glow and almost purply glow and she continues her journey as the air temperature cools under the most beautiful blanket of stars stretching overhead until eventually she can notice that she's arriving at her destination she can hear the sound of running water she can hear the faint sound of rustling leaves in trees and she arrives an oasis in this desert and once she's arrived at the oasis she sets up a tent she lights a small fire by the tent she cooks herself some food before settling down in the tent relaxing back and drifting and floating comfortably and relaxed asleep and while she relaxes and drifts and dreams her mind wanders to pleasant places she starts to dream about when she was a young girl when she used to enjoy going and playing in the nearby meadow and she dreams about being this young girl running through the meadow her hands palms stretched out down beside her with the palms of her hands touching the meadow plants the tall grass as she runs through that meadow coming to an area where the grass was shorter and sitting down in that area being able to smell the myriad of smells of the different flowers being able to just relax back under the warmth of the summer Sun and just enjoying being in the moment in these times and as she dreams so she thinks about how she really enjoyed these times as a young girl really appreciated being in that moment and she dreams about heading through the meadow to the fields opening a gate to one of the fields walking through that gate closing that gate behind her and that gate feeling very heavy and yet swinging open and closed so easily and effortlessly and heading across the field to a smaller enclosure that's surrounded by almost like a wire net and heading into that smaller enclosure closing the gate behind her and then hearing all those chickens clucking watching them as they eat seed on the ground as they all roam free in this large enclosure being able to roam free from the risk from outside the enclosure and she heads over to a chicken that's sitting there quietly then the chicken climbs off of an egg and she sits and watches as that chicken stands near the egg and the egg seems to start moving on its own just moving with a slight rocking and jolting and then there's the faintest sound of a tap and then after a few moments she notices the outside of the egg cracking and sees this strange looking beak poke through the crack in the egg and watches as this little chick hatches from that egg she finds the whole experience fascinating it was her first time ever seeing new life being born and she's always remembered this happy memory this first time seeing this as a child remembers finding her way home afterwards excitedly wanting to tell her mum and dad as she headed back round through the meadow she remembers eating dinner and eating cheesecake after dinner and while eating the cheesecake having a long conversation with her dad about the chicken and the egg and her dad turned it into a conversation about which came first and started engaging with her about a philosophical thought of what constitutes being a chicken and the girl was engaged and intrigued in this conversation and found that the idea the conversation of which came first the chicken or the egg was a fascinating conversation to have and one which she found she rarely had with friends and she remembers that that night she fell asleep sleeping so soundly so relaxed thinking about watching that little chick hatch from the egg and wondering about the distant past and a similar event where perhaps the first ever chicken hatched from an egg and what that chicken's mother thought of that chicken if they had a human-like thinking system and the girl drifted and floated so peacefully so comfortably asleep and in the morning the woman awoke she opened the entrance to the tent she could see the daylight outside the tent and see where it was she'd come during the night noticing the lush green of trees of grass and the surrounding of desert sand she could hear that bubbling flowing running water and she left her tent and went in search of that bubbling flowing water she followed the sounds round through the trees deeper into this area into this oasis in the desert as the sound of that flowing bubbling water got louder and louder until she eventually discovered a clearing where there appeared to be a lake leading to a slight stream that seemed to travel along before descending down a hole under the ground and she'd heard that many of the people who had spent generations living in this area would dig wells in the desert they would dig down to where this running water seemed to flow to and she could see part of the lake bubbling away as water was rising up out of the ground and it was the cleanest most pristine fresh water that she had ever seen and she tasted some of that water and could feel the coolness passing in her mouth down her throat and down towards her stomach and she started to explore this oasis she filled up her water bottles with this fresh water took those water bottles back to her camp she then had a smaller water bottle which she filled up to carry around with her while she was here leaving most of her stuff back at the camp and she wasn't here for the water she was here to make another discovery the thing about this oasis is that the roots of all the plant life held this bit of land in place the trees blocked a lot of the sand from flowing across here and this oasis was large enough to protect itself from most of the normal everyday oncoming desert that the heat and the water would end up creating a mini water cycle here in the desert and that water cycle would lead to clouds which would rain down some water which would regularly wash sand down towards the lake and then the bubbling water coming up in the lake and flowing would push the sand along and the sand would travel down the waterfall leading underground and would dissolve with the water and then settle within the caves under this area and in some places will lead to large damp sandy deposits that there was a book she'd read about an ancient explorer hundreds of years earlier and how this ancient explorer got lost in the desert and while they were lost in the desert they stumbled across this oasis and when they stumbled across this oasis they wanted to find some shelter they searched the oasis to see if there was any shelter and they found a cave and inside that cave they found cave paintings and they had tried to understand the cave paintings but couldn't figure them out and back then they had no way of recording the cave paintings they had written up a report of their journey and they drew some images from memory of what they thought the cave paintings looked like but nobody knew how accurate those drawings were knowing that it's natural for the mind to embellish things to misrepresent things to focus on familiar patterns and see familiar patterns in things especially retrospectively when thinking back on things and to have memories shaped by the experiences that you have and so this woman wanted to find this place the cave and see for herself she had had a lot of experience at interpreting and having the best guess at what different cave paintings might represent or mean with her ability to fuse her understanding of psychology and neurology with her understanding of how people attempt to communicate things and the ways people communicate from within their emotional needs and their essential needs like their need for shelter for water for food for safety and the human condition of wanting to be a part of a tribe wanting to belong and then wanting to help your tribe to survive and needing to communicate with them ideas that will help the whole not just the individual and after some time searching she sees what looks like just a bit of sticking out stone on the ground and she heads over to that stone she clears away some of the mud some of the grass from in front of the stone and as she does she notices that this is a cave entrance which had filled back in again almost to the top and so she dug out the excess mud before heading into the cave and in the cave she was pleased to feel the coolness of the air she looked around the walls of this cave and it was only a small cave but as she looked around the walls she could see that the cave paintings on these walls seemed to tell a story and so she looked around finding where it looked like the story began and she saw that it appeared this area was once far more fertile with no sign of desert in the description on the cave paintings and she could see different animals drawn with exaggerated features almost like they're drawn out on planes large open spaces with herds of different animals some large animals some smaller and those drawings of people near some of the animals almost as if to say it would take this many people with these implements to take on and bring down this animal as if it was sharing what you should do when hunting those animals and as she continued to explore the cave painting running her hand her fingers across the stone almost feeling a connection with the past in doing so and as she did that she could see areas where it seemed like it was saying here is where you can get different berries different fruits gather different foods and so far everything just made sense that the painting was largely about where you can catch different food what you should use to catch animals how many people it would take where you can gather for food and how many people should go out gathering and she assumed that there might well be information about how frequently you would have to do this and there may be other information that's either lost to time or that she just isn't reading here now as she continued on it looked like it was transitioning into telling some kind of legend and although she didn't know exactly the wording that was being conveyed in the drawings she could get the gist from the drawings that it seemed to be saying that there was a guardian of the land and she knows that most old cultures had witch doctors or some kind of similar role someone who knew about medicine who's able to do healing who was able to tell you when it would rain and when it would be dry who was the one that would tell you what to do to bring on rain to stop rain to help you find water when you needed it to tell you the future and nowadays the assumption is these people perhaps just knew a bit more about astronomy knew a bit more about how the weather changed with the seasons and had some other understandings that maybe many of those around them just didn't have that they could read the way plants were acting the way animals were acting that would let them know that this is the state of the year we're in and this is how things will progress and often they're portrayed as being much older and so they'd have a lot more experience with these things and a lot more understanding they will have seen the cycles of a year many many times over but this seemed different this seemed to be talking about a guardian who was able to do magic it seemed to tell a legend about a threat occurring from a monster of some kind and as she continued to look it seemed like they were saying that there was a dragon that would regularly attack this community and that this guardian who was able to do magic gathered clay from the stream and from the bottom of the lake and placed that clay just on the edge of the area the edge of this community's land and they fashioned from the clay what the woman could only describe as being like a Bigfoot monster drawing for it appears like it's as tall as one and a half people and as wide as two and the way it's drawn makes it look like it could be hairy which she thinks to herself doesn't make much sense in such a dry place but then she has to remind herself that maybe this whole area was more like this oasis thousands of years earlier and that perhaps it's only over the last thousand or couple of thousand years that so much of it is desert and it goes on to say how this guardian crafted this Bigfoot and then used their magic to bring it to life and that to make it come alive they had to gather up moss from around the lake they had to place the moss for the hair on the head they had to place the moss around the shoulders the arms the body and they had to cover that clay Bigfoot in moss and as the moss dried overnight and the moon shone down on that moss covered clay Bigfoot and the silver light of the moon twinkled and sparkled and helped to dry out the moss and dry the clay that Bigfoot came to life and that Bigfoot would then patrol around the outside of the community's land and would be able to defend the community from the dragon and it tells of a battle where the dragon came to attack the community but the Bigfoot managed to take on that dragon grab the dragon by the neck and had the strength the size and the weight to be able to hold that dragon in place and to be able to control the dragon by holding its neck and march that dragon away from the community and it talks about that dragon being led away and to stop the dragon breathing fire and being able to harm the community or any other community the moss covered Bigfoot plunged the dragon's head into the lake when the lake extended much further and the lake sizzled and bubbled as the dragon breathed out fire under the water until eventually the dragon stopped breathing fire no more fire came from the dragon and the dragon stopped struggling and just breathed calmly and relaxed and then the Bigfoot released the dragon and the dragon raised its head out of the water gave a few motions as if it was trying to breathe fire and couldn't and then flew off never to be seen again and the story continued on saying that that fire that went into the land that went into the water began to dry up the lake and move the lake to this newer position and that the land around where the lake was began to go dry and became drier and drier until eventually nothing was growing around here other than what could grow around this remaining spring and bit of lake and the community reached a point where they had to leave this area because there wasn't enough to sustain them anymore here and they could see that the environment was becoming so dry that if they didn't leave then they may never be able to make it from one place to another as the areas of void would become too large and so they all collectively left this land to go in search of new land and it doesn't say what happened to them they end the story saying that they're leaving the land to search for new land and that's where the cave painting ends and so the woman notes all of this down in her journal writing down and taking notes on everything that she understands from the paintings she took loads of photos of the paintings so that she could hopefully tell this story in more detail as she examines the cave paintings further and not only did she want to take photos of the cave paintings but she wanted to take photos of where and how they were situated through the cave so that when she analyzes all this information maybe she'll find other details perhaps faded images maybe details in where things are placed and what that means she knows that she'll probably spend years analyzing this work and after filling in her journal taking all those photos she heads back to her camp she settles down at the camp enjoys the environment here this oasis in the middle of a barren desert and as nightfall begins to set in so she wonders about the past about the idea of one day realizing that you and your community need to leave across what's becoming a desert not really knowing for sure how far you have to walk but having an idea of where the next communities should be and so deciding where the closest is and having some knowledge of where different natural springs are and perhaps heading towards those Springs and working their way as an entire community like an exodus from this bit of land in search of a new home and she wonders whether there's record somewhere of their arrival and of what happened to them and whether there are other tales similar to this tale with the dragon about what took place to lead to this land starting to turn to desert because she's sure that it is just a tale so there's no way it really could have happened that a Bigfoot was created who took on a dragon and that leading to the desert being formed and given that it is obviously mythology she wonders how long ago that had occurred before the community had created the cave paintings about the incident how many generations earlier had it likely occurred that the land had started turning to desert and stories perhaps developed about why that should be and while she thought about all this she settled back down in that tent and drifted and floated so peacefully so comfortably asleep knowing that the next day she'd wake up feeling refreshed revitalized full of energy for her journey back across the desert and all the way back to the civilization she came from to head home and to begin her work with all those photographs and all the evidence that she had gathered knowing that'll keep her busy for such a long time she just drifted and floated so peacefully so comfortably asleep