Little Snake
Alchemizing self-loathing with gentlenessssss
Dream
There was a room full of people in a public place whipped into a panic because there were snakes loose in the room. No one knew where they were. A man is making a big show of his gallantry and trying to show off by heroically going after the snakes, intending to kill them off or “slay” them.
I think he seems stupid, since he doesn’t even know where the snakes are and they’re all being so loud and chaotic that I can’t imagine they’ll find the creatures if they want to stay hidden.
I take charge and tell everyone to be quiet, and to gently move the furniture in the room to the wall. Everyone listens to me, and I go around and carefully lift a rug where my intuition is telling me to look. Sure enough, there’s a small little garter snake—black with green stripes—that is shyly lying under the rug.
I get a blanket and carefully scoop the snake up, and I feel pretty proud of myself for leading with my intuition, gentleness, and compassion. I think the snake is very cute and am glad to have saved it.
Context and Contents of the Dream
I had this dream about a week ago when I was beginning a 12-Step process in which I list my character defects and ask a higher power to remove them to whatever degree will make me more useful to spirit, to myself, and to others.
Snakes have a long and deeply intertwined (yes) history with both the healing arts and specifically with healing dreams.
This can be attributed to their capacity to shed their skin (a symbolic rebirth), their closeness to the Earth, and their primal shape and movements.
From the Wiki on the serpent and staff symbol still almost universally used as a symbol of medicine—The Rod of Asclepius:
The Rod of Asclepius takes its name from the Greek god Asclepius, a deity associated with healing and medicinal arts in ancient Greek religion and mythology. Asclepius' attributes, the snake and the staff, sometimes depicted separately in antiquity, are combined in this symbol.
In honor of Asclepius, a particular type of non-venomous snake was often used in healing rituals, and these snakes – the Aesculapian snakes – crawled around freely on the floor in dormitories where the sick and injured slept.
It’s interesting that snakes also have a long history of representing evil and carnal corruption, particularly that special brand of evil that only the sexuality of a woman can unleash upon the world (see Christianity—Eve, the serpent, exile from paradise, and the fall of mankind)
That makes a snake the perfect symbol of personal defects, particularly my personal defects, which feel intertwined with my sensuality and my insatiable hunger for fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Interpretation
When first writing down the dream, I naturally described the man as ‘egoic’—giving me a pretty obvious indication that this figure was a symbol for my ego in the dream.
He wanted to be a show-off and lead with aggression and annihilate the snakes, but he didn’t even know where to find them because he was so busy making a big show of it—putting it together, my ego is inclined to annihilate my defects by force. At the same time, it isn’t even capable of gaining proximity to my defects because it’s more concerned with inflating itself than with getting the job done.
Enter the more benevolent conscious me in the dream, prepared to take things slow, move cautiously, and carry the snake out with tenderness and care—not just for the benefit of the people in the room, because, after all, the snake was harmless. It turns out that the snake was actually the one endangered—lying under the rug and vulnerable to being unconsciously trampled upon by the people present.
Why did the snake need to be removed from the room? For one, the people in the room were in a panic. Perhaps those were the more externalized conscious projections or aspects of myself. The “people” I embody when I move through the world, a different character to anyone I come across—all of them commonly feeling threatened by a little snake on the ground simply because it has crossed the threshold from its place of wilderness into the ‘civilized’ and ‘protected’ space.
So if the snake is a symbol of my ‘defects,’ then, using the context of the previous few paragraphs, I can draw the conclusion from this dream that my perceived flaws aren’t necessarily as dangerous as they are threatening symbolically to the civilized self because they are aspects of my nature that are safer in the wilderness than inside of the boundaries of humanity.
Application
What to make of that, then?
To figure that out, I have to look at the defects I identified consciously—I won’t reproduce a comprehensive list here (for the same reason I don’t walk around naked in public), but suffice it to say that number one on the list was a tendency towards self-loathing.
So in the mad-lib dance of dream interpretation, I can create a statement from the facts, which, summarized, are:
snakes correspond with healing, rebirth, renewal, transformation, and earthly sensuality and knowledge
the snake in the dream is not poisonous but actually kind of cute
I am consciously trying to rid myself of defects as a part of my healing and transformational process right now
my ego wants to KILL the defects loudly and for acclaim
my gentle nature is more capable of ridding the defects with compassion, patience, and quietude
my primary identified defect is 'a tendency towards self-loathing’
Putting it all together…
My tendency towards self-loathing is not as poisonous as I have judged it to be, and trying to aggressively rid myself of it will potentially destroy it, when there is actually healing/transformation to be extracted or learned from it.
In this tendency is a sacred carnality and dance with the pleasures of the flesh—my ‘self-loathing’ (if treated gently, picked up with a blanket, and carried back into the wilderness) could actually contain a sensuality and knowledge of myself that, if I led with aggression, I would endanger with my brutish force.
So—this is one interpretation, and it still feels just strange and beautiful but mysterious enough to be true.
How can I apply it?
When I start to hear those inner voices—the critical ‘self-loathing’ voice—rather than being like “STOP it” to myself I can approach the voice gently with a blanket and ‘take it outside’—move it through my body, consciously move the energy into nature. I haven’t tried this method yet, but I don’t doubt that some healing energy or insight will be released when I do.