Snake Dreams

I have a recurring series of dreams that snakes are thinking of new ways to kill me.

In my last apartment, a studio, my bed was up against a wall that was basically all window. I moved in the summer, so it was really hot, and I kept the window open to get some air. My very first night in the apartment, half-awake and trying to adjust to new noises, like you do the first night you sleep in a new place (especially going from a quiet dead-end street with no traffic, to a window that looked out on Burnside), I had a hard time drifting off and had a weird succession of half-awake, half-asleep dream/hallucinations. The most vivid of them went something like this:

IF my new neighbors across the alley had a pet snake, and IF that snake was kept loose in their backyard, and IF that snake escaped through their fence and slithered across the alley between their house and my apartment, and IF the snake could scale walls and get up the side of my building, and IF that snake was poisonous, then it could come right into my apartment through the open window and kill me.

In half-awake hallucination land, that got shorthanded to: Oh my God, snakes are trying to kill me. I didn't sleep at all that night, torn between not wanting to get up and shut the window because a) it was a billion degrees and b) that would mean I was a crazy person, and fixating on the open window and how much space there would be for pretty much any kind of runaway snake on the lam from its owners to come in and kill me, including a giant anaconda or one of those tropical snakes that can climb a tree and thus would have no trouble getting into my window which was less that 20 feet off the ground.

I did feel pretty stupid the next morning. But I had the same dream several times and it always seemed totally plausible at 3 in the morning. Then, a few months later, there was another one, which went something like this:

IF there existed a snake that was both super-tiny and super-poisonous, and IF one of them escaped from a home or exotic-pet store or lived in the wild, and IF a giant bird swooped down to eat it, thinking it was a worm, and IF that bird grabbed it in its talons and flew away, and IF the bird let go or the snake wriggled out, and IF the snake fell from the sky and landed on my windowsill, then it could slither right in through my window and kill me in my sleep with no warning.

This one, upon waking, was even more bizarre and ridiculous, but still terrifying in the middle of the night.

I don't get my thing with snakes. I have this kind of terror/fascination with them. When I was a kid I used to imagine that snakes lived at the bottom of my bed and would eat my feet if I slept stretched out, which is why to this day I can't sleep unless I'm at least partially curled up. When I was a kid, I used to look at pictures of snakes to scare myself on purpose; in our set of Encyclopedias, under S for Snake (or possibly for Scare the Shit out of you) there was a giant, full-page-sized photo of a cobra about to strike - like, right up close, with its fangs wide open, about to pounce and kill you. Basically a vivid image of what would be the last thing you would see before you died. The striking cobra was one of the three pictures from informational books I used to scare myself with as a child - the other two being as follows: a massive, garishly-colored illustration of an archaeopteryx (still my favorite prehistoric creature) swooping down from the sky towards you, talons outstretched like a reptilian harpy, to attack a cute harmless little prehistoric lizardy-type thing; and St. Sebastian on the rack, arrows protruding from his heart, from my Children's Book of Saints. (Side note: May I just say that a book of saint pictures that includes blood and gore is infinitely more interesting to children than anything published by the good people at the Precious Moments franchise . . . one of the best parts of growing up Catholic is the early exposure to all kinds of bizarre violence that your parents would never let you see in movies but which are totally kosher in the Bible or saint stories - beheadings, crucifixion, starvation, rape, dismemberment, evisceration, medieval torture devices, being burned alive, etc.)





Digression. But anyway, the cobra, the archaeopteryx and Saint Sebastian (poor guy) were my three secret childhood fears, but I kept looking at those books anyway. I think when I wasn't looking at them, I was thinking about them and imagining them, and maybe looking right at them and seeing them for what they were was less scary than imagining them. Maybe the giant cobra about to strike from the pages of the S Encyclopedia was less scary than, like, a tiny and crafty snake slithering through my window, utilizing stealth and cunning to sneak up on me. At least the cobra was kind of a blunt instrument - or the picture was, anyway. It did not sneak. I chose when I wanted to look at it, or not. I was in control. So maybe it was that.

Or maybe I'm just totally nuts and have terrible judgment. (I did once bring "The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe" to read while babysitting, after the kids went to bed, and about had a heart attack when the family's grandfather clock struck midnight while I was in the middle of "The Tell-Tale Heart." I would not wish that ten seconds of blind terror on my worst enemy.)

My People #1 - Teddy Freddy

This is the first installment of what I hope, if I can get my act together, will be a regularly recurring segment where I describe the people in my life.

I am starting small because I'm new at this.

Teddy Freddy is a stuffed blue bear. I have no idea what brand he is, as a hasty Google image search leads me to believe that I am the only person left in America with this specific bear. His tag says only "MADE EXPRESSLY FOR MERVYN'S. MADE IN KOREA" on one side, and "ALL NEW MATERIALS. SYNTHETIC FIBERS" on the other. He has a blue sweater with a row of black hearts on it. He's pretty much two-dimensional at this point, from 20 years of me sleeping with my head on him.

I got Teddy Freddy for my sixth birthday from my best friend Billy, who is still my best friend, and rest assured there will be a post on him later. But for right now, we're discussing the bear. When I was little I had hordes of stuffed animals, and over them all Teddy Freddy reigned supreme, the king of his domain in the giant furry pile of creatures that lived on my bed, heaped on top of piles of embroidered pillows made by my mother and grandmother. Lesser stuffed beings lived on the shelves, guarding my books. But Teddy Freddy had pride of place, his garish blue fur clashing hideously with my pink-and-green-and-white decor. I loved that bear. I slept with him every night, in the exact same way - on my left side, with my left arm bent at the elbow on top of the pillow, Teddy Freddy lying flat on top of my arm, and my head on top of Teddy Freddy.

When I was a kid, I slept with Teddy Freddy for comfort and reassurance. He was good with stuff like Fear of the Dark, Street Noises, and Possibility of a Spider. I took him with me to sleepovers and on vacations to share my hotel room bed. If I forgot him, I couldn't sleep. Then, as I got older, I needed the reassurance less, but it was still comforting and sentimental to have the bear my best friend gave me curled up under my head as I slept.

Here's the problem. I'm 26. I have spent two decades sleeping in exactly the same position. Now I can't possibly get rid of the bear. For one, no combination of pillows (I have tried them all) can exactly recreate the precise layering of mattress/pillow/arm/bear/head that is so conducive to sleep. If I rest my head directly on my arm, the skin gets sweaty and my forehead is too hard to lean on my arm in comfort. If I remove the bear and replace it with a pillow, it's way too soft and my head sinks into the pillow and then I feel smothered, and start to worry that maybe someone is trying to kill me in my sleep. If I try to swap out the bear for like a smaller, firmer, perhaps decorative or ornamental pillow, they're either too hard or too soft and I wake up with weird fabric patterns imprinted into my cheek.

So, you see the dilemma. In my own home, there's just me. Well, and my sister, but she doesn't care. So when I'm at home, the bear's a non-issue. But I do occasionally have to leave my house. At some point it becomes bizarre for a woman who is, let's just say closer to 30 than 20, to bring a smushed, ratty blue teddy bear with her on like a business trip. (I have never done this. But I have a sneaking suspicion it's why I can never sleep in hotel beds, no matter how comfortable.)

So, here are my options:

1) Hope that I naturally and quietly grow out of the bear.
2) Get married. Have the bear confiscated.
3) Get rid of the bear, then never be able to sleep properly again.
4) Continue sleeping with the bear because what the hell, it's no one else's damn business.
5) Try to slowly wean myself from the bear like I should have done when I was like nine.
6) Ignore the problem and hope it goes away (always a favorite).

Let me just say this, in favor of bear retention - this bear has been with me through some crazy shit. Teddy Freddy has lived on three continents and in four U.S. states. He is perfectly smooshed to the shape of my head in a way that I'm sure is a metaphor for something. He has stuck with me through thick and thin, ever since the day twenty years ago when he was given to me by another person who has stuck with me through thick and thin for twenty years. In all the intervening years of birthday parties, of all the thoughtful and wonderful gifts I've received from Billy (and the not-so-wonderful, since he definitely went through a phase where all he gave me were sweatshirts), nothing has ever topped the bear.

I feel I need to say, too, that Teddy Freddy is not like a subtle and soothing, baby-boy-clothing-colored blue. He's like Crayola blue. It is a color blue that matches nothing that I own. And speaking as a person who pays pretty close attention to things like color-coordinating my comforter with my decorative pillows, I think it puzzles people to have this glaring blue eyesore in the middle of a bed otherwise decorated in tasteful neutral tones. (Okay, leopard.) He's completely incongruous and slightly (though it kills me to say it) tacky. But I like to think that Teddy Freddy knows this and embraces it. "Hi, everyone!" his crazy-ass bright blue fur and matching sweater seem to say. "I am a color of blue not found anywhere in nature and I match nothing you own! You will always be able to locate me in a pile of toys or laundry and I am the only one of my kind!" I like to think he embraces his out-there-ness. Kind of like Billy, even back when he was six. He never cared that much what other people thought. It would never occur to him, like it constantly does to me, that people might possibly care that I still sleep with a bear, that the bear doesn't match my bedspread, that the color is loud, that it says something about my fear of change that I can't even like move the bear to a shelf, that I have to have this thing with me, right up against my skin and bearing the weight of my entire head or I cannot possibly fall asleep. Billy would shrug and say, "Who cares?" Which is probably what Teddy Freddy would say too. He is a highly unselfconscious bear and knows what he is about.