otoh

As I recently explained, I hate snakes. So for this Halloween, here’s a little nightmare featuring a snake that I had a couple months ago. First, I should probably explain that I rarely remember my dreams and I’m not a big believer in dream interpretation. I did read recently that we probably dream nearly the entire time we are alseep. For some time dreams were associated just with REM sleep, but we probably just remember those dreams better.

Anyway, I know that part of the imagery for this dream came from something I saw on television. A snake had gotten inside an automobile and up behind the dashboard. They had to disassemble much of the interior of the car to extricate it. A rather odd tangent to this dream is the notion I have that snakes can’t back up. I know they can recoil before they strike, but I think that the movement they make along the ground is always forward (or sometimes sideways). I don’t know for sure that this is true. I looked in Wikipedia and, while the description of a snake’s locomotion doesn’t state that one cannot back up, it does seem to support this notion.

I know that one of the reasons I have this notion is from some friends of mine that used to have a pet boa constrictor. They had it out in the house one day and it started to crawl through the handle of a coffee mug. It was just large enough at the time that it could pass only about half its body through the narrow opening and then got stuck. It couldn’t go forward and couldn’t or wouldn’t go backward. They had to break the handle off the mug to free it.

So if a snake crawls into the spaces between all the wires and such in your dashboard, I don’t think you can grab its tail and pull it back out the way it went in. And it might get itself into a spot where it can’t keep going forward either. Even if it could go forward, who’s going to get in its face to coax it that way? NOT ME! But in this dream, it IS me. For some reason, I’m the one they call to get the snake out of the car.

So in this dream, I’m taking pieces out of the car revealing more and more of this huge snake completely entwined in the mechanical and electrical components. And the more of it I reveal, the more creeped out I’m getting because I HATE SNAKES. I AM NOT THE RIGHT PERSON FOR THIS JOB! But it is my job to get this creature that I fear and loath to go someplace it doesn’t want to go. And I had this dream on the eve of classes starting back this fall. But like I said, I’m not a big believer in dream interpretation….

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