I dream a lot. The dreams I am most aware of are the dreams between the time that I become aware that the sun is coming up (I hear the birds) and the time I actually get up. Most of them involve a house of many rooms, and people moving around in the rooms, sometimes people I know, but more often just strangers. Often I decorate and furnish the rooms nicely (like, I mentally add a chair here, and a table there, and they stick in the dreams), and I'm quite comfortable there. Sometimes I put off waking up because it's so nice there, or because interesting things are happening. Usually the dream breaks up and drifts off like mist shortly after I'm awake, up, and moving.
I had a very unusual dream last Friday morning that scared me, and that I still can't get out of my mind. It took place in this house, very rare in my dreams. I was in the kitchen. There was a very large empty glass jar on the counter to the left of the sink, and the sun was shining through the window, through the jar. I was looking at the jar, and saw what looked like a snake's head. I looked closer, trying to figure out what could possibly cause the illusion of a snake's head, and then I saw a second snake head right next to the first. I moved to the side to look behind the jar, and found two live snakes behind the jar, their bodies extending along the back of the sink and on down the back of the counter. They were those very very long very thin green tree snakes, the ones with super-pointy heads, with red and yellow eyes and mouth, like you see in "National Geographic" all the time.
I "dream remembered", if you know what I mean, that we were holding them for some reason, that someone official was supposed to come pick them up, that they were terribly poisonous, and I concluded that they must have somehow escaped from the container we'd had them in.
I jumped back away from the counter. The smaller snake slithered further along the back of the counter toward the laundry room, but the larger one lunged straight for me. I ran for the kitchen door, and the snake came after me. I ran through the living room, around the corner into the dining room, and back into the other end of the kitchen. The snake was having a little trouble getting traction on the kitchen floor, so that when I got as far as the breakfast counter, there was still about 4 feet of snake just disappearing around the corner into the living room.
I climbed up on a stool and then onto the breakfast counter - I thought maybe the snake might have some trouble getting up there, and the phone was right at that end of the counter - but the snake must have heard me, because it turned around in the doorway and came back into the kitchen. Right about then Miss Thunderfoot sauntered into the kitchen to check her food dish. She saw the snake and walked over to it. Thunder stretched out her nose to sniff the snake, and the snake raised its head and reached toward Thunder, and I thought "Ok, cat's gone." The cat and snake touched noses, sniffed a bit, and then turned away from each other. No interest.
Once I was on the counter, I had intended to kick the stool over so the snake couldn't use it to get up, but I was distracted by worrying about Thunder, and I forgot. I was frantically trying to think of who to phone, who could get here the fastest, who could handle a poisonous and determined snake, I couldn't think of what to do, when the snake came straight to the stool I had forgotten to kick over, and was coiling up it, looking straight at me --- when I woke bolt upright in the bed, panting and about to scream.
That's one dream I wish I did forget straight away, but it has been hanging on ever since.
The really weird part is that I'm not afraid of snakes. I'm also not afraid of whatever amateur dream analyzers might think snakes mean (and they're usually wrong anyway - the only person who can interpret a dream is the dreamer). The only things I am afraid of are high edges, spiders, psychopathic/sociopathic people, and people you can't reason with. And I can handle edges and spiders.
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