Dreams about snakes: a Jungian reading

A snake appears without a sound and you notice it only up close. It tends to be an image of something alive and powerful that has no place assigned to it yet — not necessarily something bad. In the old stories a snake is poison and cure at once, and in dreams it tends to be much the same.

It depends on how it looked

• still, watching yousomething is waiting for you to notice it
• it bites youit reached you before there was any time to react
• shedding its skinsomething old is coming off and it is unpleasant
• many snakes at oncethere is more of it than can be kept an eye on

A question for you

What has been moving quietly around you for so long that you no longer notice it?

And yours is read symbol by symbol

This is what a dream dictionary cannot do: it reads the dream you actually had. You write it in your own words — a house you had never lived in, a small door under the stairs, a key that did not fit — and each of those images is taken separately, with what it may be carrying for you.

Then comes the archetype the dream is standing in — the Threshold, say — a reflection that ties it to your own chart, and at the end a question to sit with. Not an answer. A question.

A dream reading needs an account, because the dream is stored — that is the point: the meaning shows up when the same image comes back a third time. The account is free and the first readings are free too.