The rattlesnake dream
Sometime in 1991, I was walking down a
back street in a Guatemalan town – either Guatemala Antigua, the old Spanish
capital; or Panajachel, on the shore of Lago de Atitlán. I was with my friend
Roger Bunch, who’d spent years in Guatemala, and a friend of his who was
interested in dream interpretation. That friend asked me to tell some of my dreans.
So while walking down that back street in Guatemala, I told him about “Dance of
the Arrows” and “Rattlesnake and Pistol.”
Roger’s friend was agog, and asked me to
write them down so he could interpret them for me. In good Marine Corps
fashion, I told him to go piss up a rope: “Forget it, buddy. Those are my
dreams, and I already know what they mean.”
I decided then and there to write this memoir. I would title it RATTLESNAKE DREAMS; it would have chapters from much of my life, including Viet Nam service and journalism travels. It would also contain many post-Nam dreams and nightmares, including the book's title piece.
Dream: Rattlesnake and
Pistol
People come running up to
me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid.
They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help:
"Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I
follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with
powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size
of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands
me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I
recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I
ever held, the one my stepdad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a
kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is
totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no-nonsense
machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade
front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws,
all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more
frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake.
You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of
scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge
back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and
look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing,
which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last
critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under
tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just
above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting
on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a
certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a
terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake
ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point
all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold,
unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches
away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer,
moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks
back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more
layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight
admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says
with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin
to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am,
after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to
bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that
different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of
the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony.
They're aware of the eye-to-eye conversation between me and the snake, and want
me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its
coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that
says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick
up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl
in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free
among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's
accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left
hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right.
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