When I was a kid, I had a few recurring dreams. There was one about a witch, a thermometer with a rising temperature and a house on fire. I had it a lot around the age of 5 or 6 and it used to scare the bejeezus out of me. I didn’t understand it as a child, for sure. That dream came back in adulthood, once or twice, and I didn’t get it then, either.
There were also dreams about snakes. Those started around the same age as the witch dream and I always took their meaning to be quite literal. Snakes used to scare the crap out of me. What’s more, they tended to pop up in my waking life on a semi-regular basis. Snakes seemed to be everywhere in the South. In the yard where I played. On the carport by the back door. In the creek where I swam. Crossing the road. As I aged and changed, the snakes stayed the same. I remember being about 10 or 11 and climbing down a ladder from the top of a shed and there was a snake – waiting for me at the ladder’s base. Never mind I had just climbed up the danged ladder a few minutes before. That snake had gotten there and was poised. Don’t believe me? It was looking up at me and coiled, ready to strike. So I did the only thing I could. I waited for the little bastard to leave, which it eventually did. As I recall, I never did go up on that shed again.
Anyhoo… The snake dreams – like the witch dreams – were fairly consistent. I would be going about my business, doing whatever I was doing in my dream, and there would be random snakes spread about. If I was walking through a town, snakes would be on the sidewalk. If I was in a house (familiar or not), snakes would be outside the door, every few feet. Combine the creepy dreams with real-live snakes in my little world, and I was one scared-of-snakes kid.
Over this past weekend I had a snake dream. The scenery was new (I was walking around Boston), but the snakes were the same. And they still gave me the heebies. When I woke, I wondered why that dream had returned, after so many years. So I did some online digging. Most sites repeat the same thoughts: fear of something in reality; unresolved issues; people who are threatening. Those same sites also tend to mention the possibility of shedding skin and some sort of personal growth. While I super-like that last meaning, I don’t necessarily think it applies in the case of my recent snake dream. I’m fairly certain snakes showed up in my dream because of ugliness in reality. I don’t like it, but it happens.
I plan to do some more digging today and hope to come to a better understanding of my snake dream. I’ll share what I find in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, I doubt I’ll find any explanations for the dream I had last night. It was unsettling and odd, and featured characters from the current season of “House of Cards.” It’s probably fair to blame binge-watching for that dream. Dang.