My dreams are long and colorful. For example, I call this one the Snake Cult dream:
I’m in a beautiful, light-filled mansion and I’m there to act in a play with a lot of actors and actresses who are also there, all standing in groups talking and laughing. I’m one of the stars but I haven’t read the script yet. It’s making me nervous, but I don’t want to tell anyone.
I learn the script is available through an app and find someone who shows me how to get to it, and I relax, but I still don’t read the script.
I’m standing in front of a movie or play poster from a prior show, and the stars of it are lined up in a V, with an older person front and center, grey hair and all. I point at the poster and look at someone who is in charge of the cast and I say, “I’m more like that than I am this, but don’t put me there.” I’m sad when I say it, not out of vanity, though. Just sad, as if I know it’s a bad place to be.
I’m walking into one of the large rooms off the main rooms where everyone else is gathered and there are pieces of snakes thrown all over the floor. Some pieces have heads, some tails, and others just middle pieces, like someone just chopped up snakes and threw them down there. They’re light colored with diamond shaped markings and still wiggling. I avoid stepping on them as I cross the room looking for an exit and someone else enters the room and steps on a piece of snake and they fall down writhing in pain. I realize they stepped on a middle piece, not a head piece, so all the pieces are poisonous. I back out of the room and see the pieces are strewn everywhere in the main rooms, too, and there are dead and dying people on the floor. There are other people still standing and walking or running around, some of whom are trying to get away and others who are the ones who threw the snakes down. I know I need to escape.
Some of the bad people tell me they want me to go with them somewhere else in the house and, as a ruse, I tell them I need to go to the bathroom first. On the way down the hall –still avoiding snake pieces and also now dead bodies and other people trying to get away– I see a mother and her young daughter trying to escape. They climb out a window in the hall.
I reach the bathroom and once inside I, too, climb out a window to a second-floor balcony. Above me on the roof I see the mother and daughter and tell them to stay there, I’ll get help.
There are stairs leading down to the lawn, but through another window onto the balcony I can see the bad people coming to break through it and get me, so instead of running down the stairs I jump off the balcony to the lawn.
I’m running across the lawn and can see another house so I run as fast as I can towards it, but I know I’ll give out before I reach it. I do, and the bad people pounce, but the people from the other house have come running out to save me.
The end, except I don’t know if they’re actually saving me or helping the bad people so maybe I was a hero or maybe it was all for nothing.
Even in my dreams I worry.