Snakes, Again

Since dreaming is one of the major focus areas in my life now it is only appropriate to lead off with a dream that led to my creating this blog.

Snakes in the kitchen...

I am in the kitchen of a house that vaguely resembles the house I grew up in. There are two other people there with me. In the middle of the room is a wooden table and on the table is a large Snake curled up like rope. Snake is very unhappy and agitated. Looking closer I see that Snake is shedding skin or molting and that the skin is curling off in little snake-like tubes and I realized that Snake is creating baby snakes this way. Somehow the kitchen is not the right place for this. I look out the kitchen door and see that the yard is drenched in very bright sunlight and so, without much thought, I act on my impulse and grab the edge of the table and tell one of my companions to grab the other edge and I push open the door and quickly carry the table outside. In the middle of the yard is a small tree or tropiary that casts a little shade and I place the table here so that Snake is in the shade. I think that this is good and that Snake can adjust to the temperature there and create the new baby snakes. Snake is happy and I am happy and when I wake I feel that I have achieved something.

Later, I consider if Snake was more than one snake or not. I also think that Snake was wearing a crown. A number of events in the waking world flow from this dream. I see that the project we had been stuggling with at the little company where I work might be brought out into the world and made into many new things. I also see that a lot of the work I have been doing on my own shares the same aspects. There is also a deep need in me to start a new dream group after the last one faded when a few members went through difficult times, like job loss or family loss. And on the first day of Spring I think to start a blog about dreams and other similar journeys.

Another aspect has come out. For the first time in a long time alchemical symbols have become very interesting again. I recently purchased 'The Alchemical Tarot: Renewed' by Robert M. Place, which I waited a long time to see reprinted. The symbols have really grabbed my attention and I wish I had more call to use them. I had never really understood the images and they always seemed to take place in some strange other land whose ideas did not very well accord with the world we now live in. I think that perhaps my efforts to strip away a lot of cultural conditioning of our Age of Reason has allowed these images to become more real to me.

I popped open Jung's book 'Dreams' which I have been meaning to read for a while but which has seemed somewhat intimidating. I found a big section on alchemical symbols in dreams which I had not noticed before. It now seems to me to be a worthy area of study as there are a lot of patterns in dreams that seem symbolic but the symbolic meaning is not clear. Some of these alchemical symbols seem to fit in. For example, a few years ago I had a series of dreams where two old ladies would appear. They would often be ambling through my dream, commenting on it or interfering or causing trouble. I spent a lot of time researching them, searching myths and tales for two old ladies but nothing seemed to fit. But in the first few pages of the Jung paper I find an illustration of twin mermaids that seems tantalizingly close to making some kind of sense as the old ladies. I'm not sure what it might mean, yet, but sometimes dreams speak like that, just below the surface peeking out, near, hinting at depths. Sometimes, no matter what, you can only wait and ripen.