A snake in a dream

What the traditions say, and why they argue

The Greeks wound a snake round the staff of Asclepius, their god of healing, and kept live snakes in his temples. That staff is still on the side of many ambulances. Not many centuries apart, the book of Genesis put a serpent in the Garden of Eden as the one who talked Eve into knowledge and got her and Adam thrown out. So, the Greeks had a snake that healed and the Hebrews had one that got everyone thrown out of the garden, and I do not think either of them was wrong about the snake that came up for them.

The ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, turns up in Egyptian tomb art and then all through the alchemist's codex, where it stands for the cycle that renews itself. In the tantric traditions of India, kundalini is pictured as a serpent coiled at the base of the spine, an energy that rises through the body. Across much of Aboriginal Australia the Rainbow Serpent is a creator and a water being, shaping rivers and waterholes, and the stories differ from people to people, so that the Kunwinjku of western Arnhem Land know it as Ngalyod and the Noongar of the south west as the Wagyl. In the Norse Prose Edda the world serpent Jörmungandr lies in the sea around the earth with its tail in its mouth, and its stirring is one of the signs of the end of the world.

Healing, temptation, renewal, energy, creation and ending, and I am not listing them so you can pick one, but because laid side by side they make the case that a symbol this old has picked up a history rather than a meaning, and I find the history argues with itself at every turn.

The paperback dictionaries flattened all this into transformation, usually with a line about shedding skin, and I understand why. It is a hopeful reading and it fits on a page, and I can see why a publisher would want that.

What Jung actually did with snakes

Jung spent his working life on archetypal images, and the snake is one he returned to again and again, in Symbols of Transformation above all, as an image of the instinctual, bodily part of the psyche that the conscious mind has not caught up with. But he was wary of universal symbol keys, and there is no contradiction in that. Archetypes are real and they recur across cultures, but they arrive dressed in the specific personal material of the dreamer's own life.

A snake in your dream is your snake, wearing whatever it is wearing because of what it means to you specifically. Skip your own associations and you get a reading that could apply to anyone, which in practice means it applies to no one.

“[I]t is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol.”

C.G. Jung, Approaching the Unconscious, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

My own snake, for what it is worth

I should admit a bias here, because when I reflect on myself, the handful of things that make me what I am, the creature I am drawn to is the snake. Stealthy but fierce when needed. Beautiful but humanity's worst enemy for millennia. I love their polarity, feared and worshipped, death and rebirth coiled into one form. The ouroboros is the logo of my business and it is tattooed on my body.

So when a snake comes into my dreams, it comes with all of that behind it, and in a poem I once wrote the golden snake from my dreams became the chain of gleaming waypoints across the sea that showed me the way to the port I was longing for. That is what the snake carries for me, and I doubt a word of it would survive the trip into your dream.

Three dreamers, one snake

Let me make up three people, because I cannot tell you about real ones and it is the quickest way to show where the lookup fails.

The first grew up on a farm where the adders came out on the warm stones in summer, and was taught as a child that when she sees them, she should stand still. She dreams of a snake across the path and her first association is "do not move". What she writes down next, before she opens anything, is a situation at work where every instinct has been telling her to stay still and wait.

The second keeps a corn snake in a tank in his flat and has done for years. He dreams it has got out and is somewhere in the room. His association is not fear at all but a mild, fond worry, and what he finds himself writing about afterwards is something he loves that he has not been looking after.

The third was bitten as a child, in a country where that could have killed her. She dreams of a snake under the bed and wakes in a sweat. Her first association is the bite, and when she asks herself what else this week have I experienced that is that dangerous, she has an answer before she has finished the question.

The transformation entry does not fit any of the three, and I do not think the entry is wrong exactly, it gives the general gist, it just was not written with these people in mind.

Before you look anything up

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language. You look it up and you get the translation. A dream image behaves more like a name than a word. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning sits in the relationship.

You can test this yourself. Take your snake dream and look up its meaning in three different dictionaries. You will get three different answers, and none of them will feel like they are about your dream. Then give the snake a minute on your own. What did it look like and what did it do, and what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of snakes, the ones you have actually met rather than the ones in myth? nine times out of ten that first answer is the more accurate one, because it is the only version that is actually about you.

Questions people ask