Sleepless

The snake dream is back. Remember the one where I look out the back door into the yard and see a snake? There is a tree, bare of leaves. And in the tree is the most enormous black snake. A terrifying, huge, black snake. And I know he is waiting there for me.

There are variations--which house I'm at, how close the tree is to the house, how long it takes the snake to come down out of the tree and come after me--but it's always pretty much the same. I see the snake. It sees me. I'm frozen in fear. It drops out of the tree (And I don't mean it slithers down the trunk or it flops onto the ground. This snake is so huge it lowers itself to the ground, with fully half of it on the ground before I can see the end of it on the branch. A. Huge. Snake.)

So, in my dream last night, the snake starts coming toward me, but I run back into the house. I try to shut the door before it can get there, but it's too fast and just comes in. The door bangs back and forth as the snake moves through the doorway. (It is almost as big as the doorway itself.) I am so panicked that I can only think to run. I run up the steps on all fours, crying and calling for my mom, who has been gone for 27 years now.

I don't know what this dream means, but I seem to have it when I am very stressed.

I am also having water dreams. My other stress symbol. The other night, I dreamed of being in an old city (Like a European city. One that had been around for several hundred years. Not a relatively new city like here in America.) when several earthquakes hit, all in a row. The cobblestones heaved underneath me, and some were even dislodged quite a bit. Then a man came running toward me, just hauling ass and terrified. I shouted "Why are you running?" And he shouted something back in another language that I didn't understand and kept running past me.

I shouted again, "Questo?" (Which, by the way, I took Italian in college and I know that means "this," but in my dream I thought it meant "why." I know that "why" is "perche," so I don't know what my dream self was thinking.) The man kept running, but he turned back to me and made a hand gesture that was like he was pushing something. I turned toward the direction he came from, just in time to see a 30 foot wave of water funneling through the street. The buildings were creating a trough-like effect and the wave was growing as it moved.

Again, all I could do was run.

The other night, I dreamed that I was in the shower and noticed mold growing all over the bathroom. In the corners, on the walls, everywhere. It grew so fast, I could see it growing. Until it covered the floor of the bathroom like seaweed. And I knew that to get out, I would have to walk naked and barefoot through all of that. I wanted to go get bleach and come back and just nuke the entire room with bleach, but I couldn't even fight it until I walked through it barefoot and naked.

Yeah. So I'm kind of stressed out these days. And not sleeping very much.