Bad Dreams

I had this awful dream last night. Bruce had a pet rattlesnake and you KNOW how phobic I am about snakes. This was a little one, but still...it was a snake, and a poisonous one at that. He was really insistent on keeping it, and all I could worry about was the cats, and how they might try to play with it and get bitten. So, I kept my eye on this awful little thing, round the clock, ALL the time. I had to know where it was and what it was up to every single minute of the day and night. But it was making me exhausted, so Bruce agreed to put it in an aquarium, so it wouldn't be slithering around the house. We apparently had an aquarium, but we had to find it, and in those brief couple of minutes while we were searching, this damned snake disappeared.

Anyway, a house-wide search was on. I remember that creepy, awful feeling of kneeling down to peek under beds and under furniture, not knowing if the snake was going to be right there at face level ready to strike at me. We couldn't find it. Bruce finally decided to check this heat vent that was weirdly placed in our study, in the wall...about knee high. He used a screwdriver to open the vent, and to my absolute horror dozens and dozens of these rattlesnakes just started falling out onto the floor. They were slithering away in all directions, under furniture, over my feet....I was screaming and desperately trying to see where the cats were. I am surprised I didn't wake Bruce up by screaming out loud in my sleep. LOL.

And all of this nightmarish trauma probably came from the snake we saw on Sunday. We took a walk on the path that runs around the 17 acres of trees that we have in back of our house. At one point, Bruce stopped me and pointed to a spot about 8 feet away and said, "Look, its a snake". I saw this little thing but it wasn't moving, so I said, "No its not. Its just a twig." But Bruce stomped his foot and the thing disappeared in a flash. It was probably no bigger than a pencil. I don't know for sure, because all we could see is its head sticking out of some tall grass. But it was definitely small. And Bruce swears it wasn't poisonous. He said he could see by the shape of its head. And even though it was tiny, I had to fight the urge to run back to the house (probably about 1/4 mile away at that point). I didn't, and I did finish our walk, but I had the most awful uneasy feeling after that. We were walking side by side....but then I made him walk in front, so he could stomp away all the snakes. Ugh. I am not sure that he believes me, but any kind of a snake-sighting, even the ones on television usually make me have bad dreams afterwards. I feel so violated.