The dream of the snakes

OK, this is a weird one. AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANY FREUDIAN ANALYSIS, OK?!? Sometimes a yard full of snakes is just a yard full of snakes.

I dreamt last night that it was Spring, and I was gardening outside of my mom's house, pulling out dead withered weeds, loosening the soil. At some point I noticed something bright green and about the size of a pencil directly in front of me. I reflexively hit it with one of my gardening tools (something I would not do in real life) before I noticed that it wasn't moving. I picked it up and looked at it and saw that it was a snake, and realized from the kink I had just put in its body that it was probably dead.

I think I stood up and started to carry it into the house, I guess to show to my mom, when I noticed a snake on the lawn in front of me. It was a rattlesnake, head raised, ready to strike. I backed up and moved away from it and started to go on a different path into the house, but then I realized that the lawn was covered with snakes, about one every square yard or so, some closer together, some farther apart. Rattlesnakes, Copperheads, Gopher Snakes, Garter Snakes, big, small, poisonous, non-poisonous. It was impossible to take a step without coming down somewhere close to a snake.

Of course, I was wearing thick leather boots in my dream, as I would be while gardening. (I was also wearing leather gloves, which is why I didn't have a problem picking up the first snake.) And naturally, my first thought was I have to get my camera and get some pictures for my blog. So I waded through the snakes, went into the house, and came back out with a camera.

By this time numerous lizards had joined the snakes on the lawn, including some big Monitor lizards who padded through the snakes without a care. I started snapping away, and got at least one shot of a snake with its face pressed nearly up to the lens. Shortly afterwards something went wrong with the camera, and the images started to include the inside of the lens and the aperture, as though the image were being pulled backwards through a tunnel. (I SAID, NO FREUD!) It was then that I realized I hadn't grabbed my digital camera, but instead a disposable film camera which somehow had an image screen attached.

I don't remember much more of the dream of the snakes. I do remember bits of two other dreams. One involved sitting in a waiting room in a hospital, waiting for some sort of procedure. There were multiple waiting rooms in the place, and I had left my coat and hat in one that was several hundred yards from the place where I would be called on. After I retrieved them, I tried to walk back to my proper waiting room but overshot it into an area of restaurants and gift shops, something like what you would encounter in an airport. I don't remember if I ever did get to have whatever procedure I was waiting to have done, done.

(UPDATE, remembered several hours later: Somewhere in this sequence I sat down to play a game of chess with a friend. I was white, he was black, though the pieces were actually more like cocoa-brown and ivory and made of wood. They were also completely scrambled on the board, so we got to work laying out our pieces. As usual I became confused as to the proper placement of the Knight and the Bishop, though in this dream it was the Knight and the Rook - heck, everybody knows where the Rook goes! And as we set up our pieces, I realized that I had some of his pieces, and he had some of mine, but the more we exchanged, the more confused things got, and then I realized that the white pieces were actually from at least three sets, including the frosted glass pieces from a glass chess set I got him in real life several years ago. I remember being very confused and upset by all this.)

Another dream involved living in a dorm-like environment. A musician was coming to play in an attached bar/restaurant, someone young and talented and beautiful and up-and-coming. I don't remember much more of that dream, only at one point I went to use the bathroom in the dorm, and realized that it was located in the one-room apartment where my boss from work lived with his young daughter and his elderly mother. They were all sleeping in beds in the same room as the bathroom, and I was careful not to wake them.

It's the first time in a long time I remember having dreams, and these were definitely odd ones.


This post was originally going to be called "Kundalini Dreams", since I seem to recall (from Foucalt's Pendulum, maybe, or maybe from one of Julian May's Metaconcert/Intervention stories) that the Kundalini is the world-snake who is wrapped around the center of the world and whose writhings cause earthquakes. But I couldn't find independent online confirmation of this anywhere. Odd how snakes have been in my consciousness lately. I just read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' The Black Dossier, which has a substory "The Crazy Wide Forever" written by Jack Kerouak's character Sal Paradise that involves Dr. Sax, who was wrapped up with something called the Great World Snake. Moore counts himself as a devotee of Glycon, an ancient snake god. Meanwhile, the discovery of evidence of the world's largest snake, the now-extinct Titanoboa, has been all over the news lately.

Oddly enough, I have never seen a snake in the wild, and have only seen two lizards - both pointed out to me by other people!