Reptilia

Snakes! I dreamt of snakes last night. One of the many incoherent dreams I have had recently. My hatred for gliding reptiles goes way back to my childhood when I remember seeing one of my Dad's relatives have a fit after being chased by a snake through cotton fields. He had almost died from the shock and poor man lived with mental imbalance for a few years. My Dad's mother used to jump and be afraid of Discovery TV channel each time us kids tuned in for watching shows like Deadliest Catch or Survivor man. She couldn't bear looking at snakes, tigers, lions- the fierce species. It didn't help that she had spent all her life in a farm house surrounded by tall crop fields. She was even wary of light. Darkness had been part of her most adult life. She found that change difficult to embrace.

As a child, I remember seeing small field snakes during monsoons around the quiet bungalow we lived in, surrounded by a large plot of uncut wild grass and trees. The terrace provided a view of clustered plot of thick green cover on three sides of our house. As a kid, I knew better than to go exploring in those trees. The children living nearby had numerous stories to tell, heard from their parents of course. It scared some of us to hear those elaborate fear tales with exaggerated anecdotes but so effective on our psyche then. When Harry Potter was broadcast on TV for the first time, it opened up so many fearless channels within children like me. Suddenly we saw all these weird creatures being seen as completely normal and acceptable in some alternative Magical world. As we grew up, some fears became dominant, others receded. I still can't tolerate certain insects but the greater fear of fighting against some of the deadliest reptiles (to my self), if the time comes does not get me into any frenzy now.

The incident that triggered this dream about snakes was the recent YouTube video of a fight between a baby mongoose and a group of snakes that chased and pried on it. I watched it on a news channel a few days ago and perhaps it left a lasting impression. One of my aunts who now resides in a cleared forest area, came up with her own tales of having faced snakes a couple of times in her backyard. She is so brave because each time she retold the events she remained unflinching and we saw her tremendous courage at protecting her kids from the predator.

The gory representation of fierce animals in children's books to inflict deadly fear about bad really fazes me out. Could we not try to be educational about their existence rather than depicting their wild nature in such a graphic manner that permanently puts off our interest in studying about animal kingdom? As kids, when we were disobedient one of my great-grandmothers who couldn't see clearly then but had sharp auditory senses would often scare us by saying our bad behaviour attracted the attention of the animals and they would take us away as we slept. She really had us spooked. No wonder we hated her then. Many years later, we heard our mothers and aunts tell us about her hard life in the jungles of Western Maharashtra as a land owner of huge tracts of forest land. She inherited that vast land and managed to steer clear of the danger of wild animals most of her life. It was only the various spooky stories circulated by the villagers as was the norm then, due to property rights and several other reasons, that she suffered from a lot of mental agony towards her later years.

A purported fear handicaps our natural defensive instincts and conditioning to fight. Anything that inflicts a larger sense of looming because of its projected fear value automatically diminishes the mental strength everybody possesses. We let our fear of unknown dominate us by squashing all possibilities of ever rising over them. My dream last night had me fighting the snake with a cleaning broom. That just indicates how we can turn instruments of non-value into powerful fighting tools. The learning bit from the dream is that we keep our fears coiled inside our minds, hearts and being, living everyday endlessly through untapped mechanisms of venting them out of our system. These then coil and turn into snakes or into a crocodile or any other predator we've named our fears. As the wisdom of the wild woman suggests- Although we walk with grace, we have a mighty roar! Our biggest voices are echoed from deep within us, they fight fears as well.