Blue_Opossum

Morning of April 16, 2017. Sunday.



This dream has various disconnected scenes featuring snakes. Its vividness grows then lessens several times. In this dream, our house seems rotated in orientation as well as with a few other changes. For example, the wooden cupboard in the bathroom directly faces the bathroom door rather than being perpendicular to it. (Despite the fact of having carefully documented and studied tens of thousands of dreams for over fifty years, the same setting, regarding its layout and overall appearance, has never occurred more than once in a dream other than in resets during the same sleeping period though even then there are differences.)

There are a number of snakes that appear over time. It starts by me noticing one in the “living room”. The living room is ambiguous as there is a vague awareness of being indoors and outdoors at the same time (a very common perception in my dreams since early childhood). The floor, for example, is somewhat like dirt, and one snake crawls up out of it. I am aware of how dangerous the snake is.

There is a scene where I catch a snake and its head is close to my face. At this time, I suddenly become incorporeal but the “other me” (who is now a different unfamiliar male) is bitten on the face by the snake. The snake then apologizes (in a human male voice) to the man. I see that it has somehow removed its fangs (perhaps spit them to the floor). It tells the man it is going to remove the venom by sucking it out. Each area where the snake’s teeth were is somewhat like a sucker on an octopus tentacle and this will apparently aid in the sucking out of the poison. The man’s life is saved by the snake that bit him.

After catching a number of large deadly snakes, I put each one, apparently dead, into a small box (which is somewhat like a white gift box of the type that would hold a wristwatch). By this point, the snakes (only the ones in the box) are only the size of small earthworms. It seems I am sending them to a herpetologist for a special study, perhaps for payment. Each snake is different. I catch a white one with purple polka dots. There are layers of tissue in the small white box that separate the snakes. I look to see if any of them are still alive but I do not see movement.

I have a false memory as Zsuzsanna speaks. She “reminds” me of the time when a dangerous eastern brown snake (said to be the world’s second-most venomous land snake) was in our bed. I recall the event clearly (even though it never actually happened, either in my dream or real life).

I go into the bathroom and close the door. A large snake is behind me just outside the bathroom door. I feel that I have no choice but to crawl up onto the top of the wooden cupboard (which as described above in the first paragraph is in the wrong location). I see its head come out from under the door. I start throwing toothbrushes, razors, tubes of toothpaste, combs, bottles of shampoo, and anything I can get my hands on. Each time I throw a bunch of items, the snake backs away, sometimes going back behind the bottom of the door, but I soon see it appear again each time. I throw items at it at least ten times or more and it gets very annoying to see the snake coming back under the door each time. Finally, I decide to climb down and make a run for it. As I am leaving the bathroom, Zsuzsanna calls a different snake a “coral snake”. Apparently, it had also been in the bathroom (perhaps in the bottom part of the cupboard). It is banded red and black and another (unknown male) runs from it (though I do not question where the other male comes from).

I then start picking up all the razors, toothbrushes, and other items that I had thrown so that I can put them back on the top of the cupboard. There are some other scenes with crawling snakes and another scene where I climb up onto the top of a tall bookcase, but my dream fades. The bookcase seems to be in the living room of the Loomis Street house, facing directly out from the doorway of the northeast bedroom and blocking it. As usual, I do not regard the fact that the bathroom is from our present home in Australia (though altered) yet certain other rooms are from the Loomis Street house in America. I have decided this may be a form of sustained doorway waking symbolism. The snake is seen as crawling under the bathroom door (thus there may be a subliminal awareness of needing to wake and use the bathroom), but in the last scene a bookcase is blocking a bedroom door. (Books are associated with an increase in neural energy and emergence of more viable thinking skills.)

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All my life, (regarding non-lucid dreams) I have contemplated why settings are always different and rarely based on any correct memory of a real location. Although the “subconscious” can never get anything right, even the most basic detail, my theory is that the setting is rendered from the concurrent dynamics of the dream based on economics and convenience. For example, if the incorrect layout of the bathroom had been correct, I would not have had the open view of the snake coming under the door and I would not have as easily been able to target it by throwing items directly at it. I would have had to fling them at an unusual angle down close to my left (while having to lean more over the edge). There have been many dreams where the incorrect nature of the setting seemed directly based on the flow of my dream’s situational dynamics. It makes perfect sense, as that is how waking thought works. (For example, when you have a particular new thought, the exact same sentences do not manifest each and every time forever afterward, or there would never be a new thought, thus dream settings are skewed by thought continuity, not based on static memories of real places.)

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