Early Mornings, Snake Dreams

Woke early this morning: about a half hour before the alarm. It had been hot last night, so I went to sleep with the window open, cooling the room. I actually went to sleep later than normal, but I think this made me sleep better, because when I woke, it wasn't that awful feeling (where did my sleep go???) but that I was really awake.

How odd. So I got up (after about five minutes to fix at least parts of my dream in my mind). Guess I'll go to work a bit early today.

The dream? I was walking through...some building. A walk-through zoo? I'm really not sure. I don't remember (though I knew in the dream, and when I first woke) what came before or after. But there was a section with snakes. There were lots of employees there working with the snakes, but guests had to walk right through where they were to get to the next section.

And I knew it was dangerous: the idea was to go slow, not do anything to startle the snakes, admire them, and come out the other side unbitten. I think they were poisonous, or at least I thought so at the time.

Naturally, of course, one of them bit me. Oh, first, a couple went past me, around my ankles, or reared up to study me then went away. But then I startled one, and it reared up, and then it lunged for my left hand and sank its fangs in deep. Poisonous? I don't know, but it ripped my hand up but good: inch-long quarter-inch-wide furrows. (Which, oddly, my mind was quite graphic about the look of torn flesh - and had plenty of room to be, because there wasn't any blood.... I don't think I want to know what it thought I was.)

I started screaming (only fair: that's what I'd do RL if I'd been stupid enough to get in that situation!) and the employees were very sympathetic, sent me back out the way I'd come to a waiting area, but the doctor who could treat it was on the next shift of employees. I had to wait 5-10 minutes for her to show up, then she did some extended scan of the injury.

That was really bizarre. This thing stuck up through the table, and she had me put my hand next to it and hold perfectly still. And the table and my chair moved around, rotating, so that it could get the whole hand. Really odd. When she was done she seemed satisfied - I don't remember any actual treatment - and headed in to work with the snakes. Oddly, I was satisfied too, no longer worried about the hand (and I don't remember seeing it again the in the dream to see if it was fixed, bandaged, what).

I do remember apologizing, as she headed in, for having spilled a container of snake-food. I don't remember the container but it was either on that odd table or some nearby surface, because I spilled it near the chair. (And it looked, oddly, like giant flakes of tropical fish food....)

Weird. Good morning.

GOOD morning!

The sky outside my office window is such a vivid blue this morning, deep blue, clouds and haze paling it only at the very horizon, though her eand there a thin band or a dapple brush of soft white cloud touches the middle of the sky.

Morning sun: everything is strong. The purple leaves of these trees I do not know, the dark green of the fir, the brighter (somehow cleaner, younger) green of the deciduous trees among them.

The brick of the building across the way is a pale pink, paler than its usual, and the protective coating on the windows there (and on my windows, through which I look) renters them a vivid sea green in the morning sun.

Birds fly, moving from tree to tree or soaring sharply up in front of my windows. Perhaps they sit on the roof; perhaps they nest under it. Cars move in the parking lots, people still coming to work, the glint of sunlight stronger than neon purple or flaming scarlet, the colors half-imagined beneath the gloss of light.

The street is half in the shade of the trees, the asphalt dark grey, and next ot it the other lane, sun-touched and pale, the yellow double-line wavering in and out of clarity: vivid lemon, mustard, vivid lemon.

It lacks only rain, whose touch would soften, cool, gentle, glisten in the light - but might take away the diamond-hard edges, the crisp clarity of the morning, the sun, trees, sky, the breeze tugging at the leaves. Much as I love the water, let it not steal one moment of this morning....