A bad dream woke me at 5:30 in the morning, when the room was gray. I’d been finding snakes in my home. They were big, like cable, a sleeping length that led who knows where. Look down in a potted plant and there was a snake bulking a couple of feet high, but just that section of the snake; head out of sight, the end of the tail out of sight. I never thought to check about those. I was too busy panicking, feeling invaded, feeling like the worst was never supposed to happen but it had decided to go ahead and happen anyway and I just had to live with it. My reality was exactly what it wasn’t supposed to be: it had hulking, sleeping, immovable snakes in it, and they could do as they liked. Asleep now, no guarantee they’d stay that way. They terrified me and my skin felt like it would jump off. I felt like I couldn’t live if one of those things was around, and they were definitely there and sent my nerves screaming.
All else was quiet and ordinary. Something like the living room where I’d grown up, something like the dining room that adjoined it. An overcast day visible somewhere past the windows; in bits and pieces, little rectangles.
The snake, what I saw of it, had a color and pattern to its scales. An inflamed coral red fading and collapsing into an equally inflamed yellow-white. The shifts in tone formed something like a chain of diamonds, ill-defined ones that had something dwarfish about them, but they marched along.
I had another look at the scales and their color because my brother held the snake, one arm toward the tail, the other toward the head, as he took long steps across the living room. The snake must have been smaller now, since he could grapple with the thing and I could get a look at the whole. Dreams flip these elements on you; they make a thing big without limit, then all of a sudden it’s an armload and in view across the distance (the distance from wherever I was in the dream; I suppose our living room extended off further than in real life).
Seeing the snake placed and finite didn’t help me. I was still scared just that it existed. The sight of it destabilized my nerves, and the universe was still telling me that this was what I had to live with. Nightmares can have a “chips are down” feeling: reality’s going to stop fooling around and show you everything you don’t want to know, the things that make your existence a figment and a waste. Thus, I reflected that my brother shouldn’t be unafraid of snakes and clasping one in his hands.
I woke up and looked at my feet in the grayness and tried to feel bemused rather than alarmed as my heart raced. I knew the score: bad dream and I was scared wide awake and persuading myself that nothing more was about to happen. Odd, humbling to have a replay of what used to plague me when I was a child and edging into adolescence—I mean night frights and wondering what thoughts would overpower me, the visions that would elbow in and puff themselves up.
Lying in the gray, I finished my thought from the dream. Snakes are a disabling fear for my brother; that’s the reality of it. I don’t like them but I could watch Anaconda (years ago, Mexican theater), whereas he can’t hack Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in the dream I had to watch him get ahead of me, be the one who functions.
I fell asleep again, woke up again, on and off until hours had passed and I had to get out of bed still jittery, and in the end I was late for my appointment.