Reptile
Any reptile in your dreams may depict your surface feeling reactions to that creature, such as like or dislike, attraction or repulsion. But in many cases reptiles such as a snake or lizards are used to portray your very basic instinctive responses to life, such as the fear reaction, flight or fight response, the sexual drive toward reproduction, territorial display, and ritualistic social behaviour – shaking hands, bowing, etc.
The reptile also frequently shows how you are dealing with such enormous flows of emotional or nervous energy. For instance fear is a great protector, but in human life, because we can keep stimulating the response by imagination, by words, it can become overactive to the point of illness. A gazelle may be chased by a lion. If it escapes it doesn’t spend days shaking or drinking alcohol to cover its fear. In a few minutes it is quietly grazing. A human in such an encounter can replay it over and over.
The point is that you cannot become a fully mature human being until you learn to meet these ancient drives and integrate them into your everyday life. So it is important to develop a working relationship with the snakes, lizards and frogs in your dreams. See: Snake, Alligator, Frog.
Comments
Exhusband whom i love dearly and never wanted to leave is pulling me by my wrist as i hold our baby boy we lost right before he left. I am pulling our other 4 children and we frantically run from something. The moon is changing colors and there are huge snakes trying to keep us from going anywhere..three of them
Jennifer – Every dream image, every animal or serpent in your dreams, ever person you dream of is not an external thing, but are your own life energies, emotions, abilities and potential given meaning in images and drama.
So the snakes that are as you say, are trying to keep you from going anywhere, are actually your basic evolutionary energy that you are afraid of. And you are afraid because it wants you to change, to enlarge, to become capable of adapting to what we are facing in the present world crisis.
When you sleep there is no one else there except you and your imagination. Unfortunately we have been conditioned to see the snakes as something to be afraid of. Certainly outwardly they are sometimes dangerous, but within you they are an expression of your fundamental brain processes, your reptile brain. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/ to see how our body had to develop different levels of thinking and reacting.
From Genesis onwards we have been told the snake/serpent is evil. But it is not. The word translated ‘serpent’ is Nahash. The word for snake in Hebrew is sheretz. Nahash is a special word that does not refer to a snake at all, but to a force or process. It means evolutionary energy, or energy which tends to individualisation or selfhood. To make a story Genesis has been consistently mistranslated.
However, your dream. The love in you is urging you on to escape from something unknown, but obviously threatening. The moon gives a clue, it is your female intuition and link with nature and the cycles of your body. The changing colours say a huge change is occurring, but what.
The snakes – I feel certain that if you see them as your own energy that you are frightened of, will turn out to lead you to understand the changes that are occurring in you and in your life. They are evolutionary, so will do the work for you.
Tony