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An addendum on snakes and fire
Jul. 10th, 2019 09:01 amLast night, I was engaged in chatting with a friend about his current project, and didn't get around to posting. I thought I might enlarge a bit on the subject of snakes and fire, given the intriguing comments on my last post. As a child, I had frequent, repetitive nightmares that were quite terrifying. I didn't realize that this was not normal, perhaps because my sisters often woke up crying, too, and my father often woke up screaming as well. The only time he ever answered a question about this, he grudgingly admitted that he dreamed about getting trapped in barbed wire. So perhaps his nightmares were caused by his time in the Army in the Pacific campaigns. My worst nightmares were about being attacked by snakes. I often woke up and lay motionless for an endless time, unable to move a finger because I was convinced that I was surrounded by rattlesnakes who would strike and kill me at the slightest hint of movement. The snakes in my dreams were malevolent, vicious, and out to kill me.
In real life, I was also terrified of snakes. I worked on getting over it, over the years, and succeeded in dialing the fear back quite a bit. When we lived in Pennsylvania, we were near a wetland area, where I had a series of interesting encounters with snakes that helped to alleviate my fear. The dreams gradually diminished as well, but I still occasionally dream of malevolent serpents, and wake up in a bad state of mind.
My sister once hypothesized that I dream about fire because I spent three summers as a small child on a mountaintop where my father was a fire watcher. If he ever did see smoke in the forest, he had to get his gear and go down the mountain to join in fighting the fire. There was no danger to us, because we were well above the tree line, but the topic of fire danger was certainly omnipresent. I don't remember being afraid for that reason, though. In real life, I'm fascinated by volcanos and have done a lot of research about them, because they appear in the back story of the Typhon novels. Growing up Catholic, I knew all about being burned at the stake and was terrorized by the idea. I also had repeated apocalyptic dreams about being trapped at the end of the world, between the oncoming streams of lava and the tsunami rolling in from the sea.
In my dream about snakes and fire, the city had burned down, including my house. I was working with a team to search the wreckage for survivors or salvage. In the still-smoking ashes, we found forms of massive serpents, perfectly preserved in shiny black ash, down to the last scale. It was kind of like Pompeii. Who would have thought so many snakes were living among us the whole time? Where did they all come from? They were everywhere. I feared to touch them, lest the ash flake off to reveal a live and angry snake. What if there were more roaming the ruins--half-burned, maddened by pain, seeking revenge? What if hatchings of baby snakes had survived and would swarm up out of the ground to attack the rescue teams? It was at this point that I woke up.
I'd like to create a forest garden of the mind, where fearless and harmless snakes roam with patterned scales bright as bird's plumage, and fire is our wild and glorious servant and friend, but I'm not master of my dreams and I'm afraid that in them snakes and fire still inhabit a landscape of mayhem.
Last night I had a much more cheerful dream about the continuing adventures of Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley was trying not to be evil, and kept coming up with what he thought were bright ideas that made people uncomfortable and worked out in an unusual way. For instance, he observed that people liked trees, but trees grew very slowly compared to the lifespan of humans. So he created a thing like a tree that rapidly grew to a useful size, but unfortunately ended its life in a spectacular explosion. Aziraphale tried to make him feel better by telling him this was not all that unusual. "Look at it this way," he said. "It looked nice and gave people pleasure for a time, and then it disintegrated. That's pretty much how everything goes in this mortal world. It's not just you." Crowley also observed that people liked to look out the window and have a nice view, so he made some windows. However, they started showing people unexpected scenes, many of which were quite disturbing. Crowley thought he could fix this by enclosing windows in a box, so people wouldn't have to look out of them unless they wanted to. Unfortunately, this prevented the window from admitting light into the room, which Aziraphale pointed out was another important feature. He told Crowley that mortals had already invented TV to do the same thing as his magic windows. Crowley was crestfallen.
In real life, I was also terrified of snakes. I worked on getting over it, over the years, and succeeded in dialing the fear back quite a bit. When we lived in Pennsylvania, we were near a wetland area, where I had a series of interesting encounters with snakes that helped to alleviate my fear. The dreams gradually diminished as well, but I still occasionally dream of malevolent serpents, and wake up in a bad state of mind.
My sister once hypothesized that I dream about fire because I spent three summers as a small child on a mountaintop where my father was a fire watcher. If he ever did see smoke in the forest, he had to get his gear and go down the mountain to join in fighting the fire. There was no danger to us, because we were well above the tree line, but the topic of fire danger was certainly omnipresent. I don't remember being afraid for that reason, though. In real life, I'm fascinated by volcanos and have done a lot of research about them, because they appear in the back story of the Typhon novels. Growing up Catholic, I knew all about being burned at the stake and was terrorized by the idea. I also had repeated apocalyptic dreams about being trapped at the end of the world, between the oncoming streams of lava and the tsunami rolling in from the sea.
In my dream about snakes and fire, the city had burned down, including my house. I was working with a team to search the wreckage for survivors or salvage. In the still-smoking ashes, we found forms of massive serpents, perfectly preserved in shiny black ash, down to the last scale. It was kind of like Pompeii. Who would have thought so many snakes were living among us the whole time? Where did they all come from? They were everywhere. I feared to touch them, lest the ash flake off to reveal a live and angry snake. What if there were more roaming the ruins--half-burned, maddened by pain, seeking revenge? What if hatchings of baby snakes had survived and would swarm up out of the ground to attack the rescue teams? It was at this point that I woke up.
I'd like to create a forest garden of the mind, where fearless and harmless snakes roam with patterned scales bright as bird's plumage, and fire is our wild and glorious servant and friend, but I'm not master of my dreams and I'm afraid that in them snakes and fire still inhabit a landscape of mayhem.
Last night I had a much more cheerful dream about the continuing adventures of Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley was trying not to be evil, and kept coming up with what he thought were bright ideas that made people uncomfortable and worked out in an unusual way. For instance, he observed that people liked trees, but trees grew very slowly compared to the lifespan of humans. So he created a thing like a tree that rapidly grew to a useful size, but unfortunately ended its life in a spectacular explosion. Aziraphale tried to make him feel better by telling him this was not all that unusual. "Look at it this way," he said. "It looked nice and gave people pleasure for a time, and then it disintegrated. That's pretty much how everything goes in this mortal world. It's not just you." Crowley also observed that people liked to look out the window and have a nice view, so he made some windows. However, they started showing people unexpected scenes, many of which were quite disturbing. Crowley thought he could fix this by enclosing windows in a box, so people wouldn't have to look out of them unless they wanted to. Unfortunately, this prevented the window from admitting light into the room, which Aziraphale pointed out was another important feature. He told Crowley that mortals had already invented TV to do the same thing as his magic windows. Crowley was crestfallen.
