Odd dreams

I woke up with memory of several moments in dreams last night.

One involved picking up a snake; I believed it was a harmless little garter snake, so I allowed it to bite me. (I might have been showing it to my girlfriend, who does not generally care for such creatures). It did bite me, but in a way no snake has ever bit me before, unhinging its jaw and attaching itself open-mouthed to the palm of my hand, where it proceeded to suck my blood. It was just a tiny snake, but I could feel it sucking hard, and I began to feel worried...

In another dream, I was in Japan. Or maybe the USA. Or maybe both. My mother was with me but I left her to gamble, to I could look for books to sell. Adrian Mack was coming to town, and I went up an alley hoping to find, perhaps, some strange Japanese item as a souvenir for him. One store at the end of a lane had groceries, and I was about to leave when I noticed a toy section. On one wall they had an odd cross between a triceratops and a bird that I thought might be interesting. I asked the shop girl if she spoke English, and then in a cross between English and Japanese asked if she could show me what the thing did when it was turned on. (I couldn't remember the Japanese for "batteries," which is interesting, because often when I'm dreaming of Japan I speak better Japanese than I could in my waking life; but awake, now - even tired as I am - I seem to recall that "batteries" is "denki" or "denshii" or something like that). After waiting on another customer, she obliged me, put in the batteries, and turned it on, and it began to sort of writhe up and down, and I determined that it wasn't a very interesting motion. I apologized - if that's all it did, I wasn't interested.

I walked back to a place where my mother was, in another part of town. She told me, happily, that she had won $10,000 gambling! I had my doubts that she had her figure right - it was probably only $1000. She was standing in a town square with other people, looking at some sort of billboard or electronic display where there were figures. I said that  there was a bookstore I wanted to go look at, to see if I could find a particular item. It was, in fact, a restaurant. Someone had reported seeing a rare Edward Abbey book there - I forget what it was supposed to be, but it was worth a lot of money. I left Mom in the car, because apparently we had a car, and went through the restaurant, looking for this book; there were a few books in corners, stacked up, but none were valuable. Then I saw outside that there was a bin of books they were selling. I dug in, and dreamed of several books, including one less-rare Abbey title in the box (it occurs to me just now that "Abbey" is the name of the person who replied to my Criterion post on their website). I even saw some UFO pamphlets and thought, hey, these would be a good gift for Mack. I had quite a stack of books when I realized that I had left Mom waiting a long time.

Then suddenly the bin of books was a car, I was in the back seat, and Mom was waiting outside. I let her in. She said, in broken, aphasiac speech that she had worried where I'd been; and then she let two Japanese women into the front seat of the car, and they brought with them two cats and a dog. Both cats began to jump all over me. They were similar, note, to my girlfriend's cat, which has suffered a tail injury recently, but they were unharmed, and because they were two of them and they were quite excited, I began worrying that they would spray on me. I opened the car door to let them out, but they jumped back in again.

Somewhere in there, I woke up.