Constricting black snake chasing me. Please answer

[Joseph191100]

Hey, I had had this dream last night and I want to know what it means, it's the second night in a row that I've had a weird dream, I'm 16, male, I have heaps of good friends, have severe anxiety, slight depression and not the best relationship with my parents. I live in a really small town in Australia and anyway so my dream went like this... It was at my house but my best friend owned it instead, I was in her room (My bedroom) and on the walls in the room were her pictures, posters and her wall tapestry. I left the room and went outside to sit on the chairs on the patio I look over the the gate in the yard and see a big black constricting type snake rolling around and around like a crocodile would with prey, I run inside and shut the door and It has it's head under the door trying to bite me. The dream ended there and I woke up. Could anyone help me understand what it meant? Thanks.

[Athanor]

It’s not always fun being a teen as you know since you’ve unfortunately been having some problems with anxiety and depression. It looks like something might have recently happened that made things even a little worse and although the weird dreams are upsetting, they’re trying to show you in a symbolical way a couple of underlying reasons for the way you’re feeling and to therefore give you a couple of hints about how to improve the situation. For example, generally speaking, a house symbolizes the dreamer’s overall personality. The various rooms represent more specific areas of the dreamer’s outlook and habits etc. etc. In the dream, your female best friend owns the house and the action takes place in the bedroom and out back on the patio. In the dreams of a guy, a girl usually represents such things as how he handles values, emotions and his overall receptivity etc. Since the language of dreams consists of “as-ifs”, analogies and metaphors, it looks as if you might not “own” your own feelings and creative side etc. etc. enough of the time. This idea is suggested by the pictures etc. on the wall which aren’t yours but hers. Also, the location of the bedroom might be hinting that you’re sometimes too “asleep” or “unaware” of the fact that certain emotions and thoughts etc. might tend to appear on the scene but they quickly disappear again too quickly. This could understandably happen, for instance, if they tended to be too painful to handle at times. It’s possible that the dream then shows you what type of thing is especially hard to deal with by taking you out to apparently the back patio which would symbolize “looking into your unseen unconscious side” (that is, something that is “behind” and “in back” of you). There, the frightening scene with the big black constricting snake appears. There are a lot of possible meanings for the appearance of a snake in dreams, but basically, since dream images work by analogy, it’s no accident that the long sinewy shape of a snake is just like the human brain stem and spinal cord which in turn is where our deepest and most instinctive automatic responses come from as opposed to the other more “human” parts of the brain. In general, it’s as if our basic inborn instincts as symbolized by a snake don’t like to be ignored or disparaged in any way, and they can gradually get “angrier” and more “aggressive” if we ignore something we’re doing that is in some way hurting them although we’re very unaware that we’re even doing this. So it’s possible that the black snake who is “chasing you” in the dream comes out in a practical way in you feeling anxious too much of the time. The idea is that your psyche can be a source of ongoing renewal and change just like a snake was believed to be “reborn” when it shed its skin and had a new one, or it can be a destroyer something like the constrictor in your dream who is in the midst of killing its prey. While scary to face, it’s usually best if we can look at certain upsetting realities of our instinctive side head-on over time. For example, moments of cruelty, selfishness, greed, envy, rage, jealousy etc. etc. are hard to look at but they’re part of our own human nature which we just have to manage instead of maybe kind of shutting them out totally and just wanting to show our nice side all the time. Anyway, I hope that these ideas aren’t too confusing and that they can be helpful in some way. Please feel free to comment on, or to ask any questions about this particular way of looking at your upsetting but helpful and important dream.