Chris - What I have to say might not be right, but I couldn’t understand your dream right off, so I asked my intuition and here is what I received.
The dead snake is something that you have made lifeless, perhaps through such a rigorous examination of your inner energies and emotions. It is white because it has reached a point of clarity, purity in fact, probably through hard times in which this central part of you passed through the fire that burnt in you.
For the same reason it was cut open through your rigorous searching for where the pain came from. But like all things in the dream world it can be resurrected through love and understanding.
The snake relates to what is often called kundalini - you life energy that has enormous latent potential. It can become anything, but it has to be made real in the world of the body through hard work in real-ising it. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/kundalini/ and of course use to ‘be’ the dead snake and perhaps bring it to life once more -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPersonTony