We finally took the Christmas tree down, necessitating the retrieval of its giant box from the basement.  Fausto hid inside it and struck playfully at our wiggled fingers like a rattlesnake, lightning-fast, before the box was banished for another year.

That night I had a strange dream about a coworker who kept a fictitious pet snake in her office—it was 8 or 9 feet long, and glossy black with jewel-like dark eyes and a white shading to its throat.  I am normally quite afraid of snakes but in the dream I was not, and held and carried it around.  Sometimes the snake was just a snake and sometimes I found it had turned into my cat and then back into a snake again.  In the dream, I remembered Benzaiten, the Japanese goddess, who is said to have snakes as her messengers, especially white ones.  In fact, we had just visited her island, Enoshima, a couple weeks ago.  The dream then fell apart, as dreams do, and there was something about Thanksgiving dinner and the actual cat’s presence replaced the dream-one who was sometimes a serpent and I woke up.

It was odd not to be frightened of the snake in the dream, for often they do appear as fearful objects for me in dreams and in real life, especially in Japan.  Of all people, I have seen snakes in the heart of downtown Tokyo (at a Shinto shrine, nonetheless—a rat snake), and the poisonous mamushi and habu in their respective locales, although the latter was a bit too close to my habitation for comfort’s sake.  So a serpentine emissary, perhaps, but I am uncertain of what the message may be.

(Benzaiten by Ogawa Haritsu (1663-1747))