Have You Trained YOUR Dragon?

To breathe fire or to fly away

By Carol Flake Chapman

You could say that I have a thing for dragons, a kind of love/fear thing. With their ability to fly and to breathe fire, they represent for me the power of imagination — but also the deep potential for anger, vengeance and destruction we carry within us. I like to think of the oldest part of our brain, the amygdala, sometimes known as the lizard brain, as our inner dragon. The amygdala controls our most basic emotional fight-or-flight responses, instilling fear or urging us to take aggressive action. Breathe fire or fly away.

They could have filmed How to Train Your Dragon 1 and 2 in my writing studio. I don’t have a Night Fury like Toothless or a Deadly Nadder like Stormfly. But I’m looking around the studio, and I see lots of dragons on the wall and hanging from the ceiling: A sinuous plastic dragon from Hong Kong, a stylish balsawood dragon I bought in Lisbon, an antique cloth dragon from San Francisco, a dragon calendar from Tibet. I also have a treasured 18th century Japanese scroll with a rather scary dragon depicted in ink.

But my favorite dragon is a little stuffed guy that I bought at a toy shop on the Piazza Navona last January. I was working on a book while at the American Academy in Rome, feeling very very lucky to be there. But unexpectedly I was overcome with loneliness as I looked out my window atop Janiculum Hill on the splendors of Rome. My late husband and I had treasured our time together in Italy, and I was finishing a memoir about his death and my pilgrimage through grief, which obviously triggered my sense of loss. But somehow what I was up against was even more primal than that. I felt that perhaps my real purpose in coming to Rome was to face what I came to call the dragon of existential loneliness.

It was during one of my long walks, winding up in the Piazza Navona, which was particularly festive on the days leading up to the Epiphany, that I saw this little dragon in the window of the shop called Sogni (Dreams). I bought it on impulse, not really knowing why I wanted it. Maybe it was a way of taming my dragon of loneliness, by making it small and cute. Once it was perched on my writing table, I began to feel better, and I felt my imagination beginning to get stronger than my fear. I wound up buying a small unicorn I noticed in the window of yet another toy shop to keep the dragon company as I worked. And as though I had entered some kind of magic kingdom, a double rainbow appeared outside my window on my last day in Rome.

As I prepared to leave, I packed the small dragon in my carry-on bag, and when I boarded my plane, I placed in the overhead bin and settled into my seat. Before I had buckled my seatbelt, a woman and child came down the aisle and sat in the seats across from me. The young boy was clearly autistic, and he really didn’t want to be on the plane. After takeoff, he began to scream bloody murder, and passengers around him were alarmed. The stewardess arrived and asked the mother to do something, but the screaming continued.

For some reason, I thought of the dragon in my carry-on, and I stood up and retrieved it from the overhead bin. I began to make it fly in front of the boy, zooming it back and forth, back and forth. He began to watch it, mesmerized, and he stopped screaming. I held it out to him to hold it, but he stammered, “No dragon, no dragon.” But then he reached out his arms to me. I held out the dragon to him again, but he shook his head. It wasn’t the dragon he wanted.

I somehow found the boy’s arms around my neck, and then I was holding him. I rocked him back and forth, and he rested his head on my shoulder for a few minutes. I set him down, and he took my hand, and we walked up and down the aisle for a while and came back to his seat. He sat down and was quiet for the rest of the trip.

For a time, I didn’t really know what to make of what happened. But I now think that the dragon of loneliness wound up connecting me in a primal way to the little boy, where his — and my — deepest fears were found. The dragon flew through the barriers separating us and brought us together for a moment or two.

And so for me, dragons represent the difficult things about ourselves that we have to stop running from and face someday, in one way or another — either to do battle with them or to make peace with them. And even to embrace them. Perhaps it’s the dragons that do the training. We’re the ones who need taming, right?