serpentine midwife

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was sitting on a bed in a room that was barely bigger than the bed itself. A dim, incandescent light shone down on the bed.

There was a snake on the bed with me. I may even have been holding the snake in my hands. It was a dull green snake with a white underbelly and beady, black eyes. The snake was maybe 60 or 70 centimeters long.

The snake was apparently giving birth or laying an egg like a chicken egg. It was doing so by making the egg come out of its mouth. This seemed to be really hard on the snake.

The snake finished laying her egg. But I knew there were more eggs to lay. I needed to check on the progress of the second egg. I had to grab the snake's head and open her jaws. The snake was poisonous, and I was afraid of being bit, but I knew I had to check. But even as I opened her jaws, the snake didn't seem very violent at all. She seemed gentle, drained.

I looked down into the snake's throat. I saw the second egg, a little way down. I let the snake go. I thought she would lay the second egg presently. But she just lay there limp. I figured she had lost so much energy in having her first egg that she needed to rest before having the second egg.

I stood up and walked out of the room. I thought I would come back closer to the time when the snake was ready to have her second egg. I was now in a dim room like a basement living room. The area had low ceilings, and even though it was long, it felt so cluttered with stuff that it felt tight and cramped.

At some point a kind of old, overweight woman with short, square, blonde hair and a peach-pink shirt walked into the room. She was still "asleep": she may have been sleepwalking. It was like she was recovering from a bad illness which had sent her either into unconsciousness or delirium.

I walked down toward the end of the room and met up with a group of young women. I myself may have been a young woman. All the women (including myself?) were pregnant, or else they were in need of a midwife's assistance for some other women they knew nearby who were about to have babies.

Apparently the old woman was the midwife all the women were looking for. We saw the woman again. She was walking around like she was in a drunken stupor. The woman walked over to the wall and then flopped down onto some spot like a counter or a desk top as if it were a bed.

It was clear the old woman needed more rest before she could take on the tasks of a midwife. But the women were all going to approach the old woman anyway. Each of the women, like me, had a snake. The snakes were all giving birth to eggs. And the old woman was the only one who could help with the births. The old woman still needed to recover a lot, but she was probably well enough to be midwife to the snakes, even though it would drain her energy.

The women all tittered to each other about how childlike they'd appear, all coming to the old woman at once, asking her for help. The girls all joked that they'd seem like little girls, asking, "Help my snake? My snake? My snake?"

But behind the joke was the sentiment that the women really did need the old woman to help with the snakes. And behind that sentiment was a fear. The snakes were something like a buildup. The women really needed the old woman's help giving birth to their own babies. But the women were afraid to bring up the topic. They were afraid the old woman would still be too ill to deliver the babies when the time came, or that the old woman would simply refuse. So the young women became overly, though jokingly, focused on the snakes, and how much they needed the old woman's help with the snakes.