The Snake, the Raccoon, and the Woman

July 2017. I was working two jobs after failing to make it in recruiting. I had a one-year-old daughter, about to move out of my in-laws’ basement the next day, when my wife and I had a fight, and she told me we should separate. So, I drive to my sister’s house to crash for the night. Despite all of this, I told myself that, on paper, I had a lot of things going for me—a bump in the road at worst. I’d always had vivid dreams, and growing up Mormon meant I was open to dreams as a means of communication from the Divine, but nothing had prepared me for this one.

I’m at a zoo. There’s a raccoon that climbs down a tree and, being a clever little bastard, begins banging on the glass of a terrarium that is housing a rattlesnake, agitating it. The snake coils, strikes at the glass repeatedly, until it somehow escapes. The strangers around me panic and run in various directions. I notice there is a dark-haired woman next to me—my date—and I tell her that we should hold still. The snake begins slithering up my leg, then to my torso.

I am aware of something strange: my actual hand twitched in bed. My sleeping body moved, and the dream incorporated it. The movement causes the snake to bite my hand. I feel the fangs pierce the skin, and the venom is injected into the muscle and bloodstream. The woman with dark hair takes me by the hand and says, “I’m going to go get help; it’ll be ok!”

I woke up as the morning light snuck into the room through the closed blinds, I knew the dream was important—not in the way you think you know something; in the way your body knows before your brain catches up. Yet, I didn’t know what was important about it. About an hour or so later, it became clear: This dream was telling me my marriage was over.

Several months later, I worked with a Jungian Analyst. He suggested that the raccoon represented was my mask—the charming, resourceful Persona I’d been wearing for years. The rattlesnake was the thing I’d been poking at; the shadow material, the primal and reptilian part, that kept feeling aggravated every time I identified as my Persona. And the woman? She’d been showing up in my dreams for years. The Analyst would call her the Anima.

But I didn’t need to know all those terms or to sit down with a Jungian textbook that morning to decode everything. That’s not how this works.

What Dreamwork Actually Is

Here’s what dreamwork isn’t: looking up “snake” in a dream dictionary and reading that it means “healing” or “danger” or whatever generic nonsense pops up. That’s like Googling your symptoms and diagnosing yourself with a rare tropical disease while living in Utah. Technically, you used a tool. Practically, you feel more confused, and you may have worked yourself up over nothing.

One of the methods I use most is called the Ullman Method, and it works like this. You know when your partner says they’re hungry but doesn’t know what they want?

“How about burgers?” No.

“Chinese?” No.

“Thai food?” Ohmygod yes.

That’s it. A dream group does that with your dream. They offer projections: “If this were my dream, the raccoon might be…” And you sit there listening until something lands. Until your gut says, “That’s it! That’s the thing!”

You can’t always think your way to what a dream means (in my experience, you end up thinking in circles). You have to feel your way there. That’s because dreams are a lived, somatic experience, so the meaning isn’t purely intellectual. It hits you in the chest or the stomach or the back of your throat before it ever reaches your prefrontal cortex.

What Jungian psychology adds to this is the idea of compensation. Your unconscious isn’t just replaying your day or processing anxiety. It’s correcting you. If your waking attitude is too one-sided, too optimistic, too rigid, too comfortably numb, the dream may push back. It shows you what you’re refusing to see. My waking life said everything is fine; my marriage is fine. The dream sent a rattlesnake.

How I Work With Dreams Now

The rule is simple: write before your feet hit the floor, write down the dream. At a minimum, I write down what I call dream anchors, which are key moments, figures, emotions, etc., that work like a type of Method of Loci. I recommend having a physical notebook in case you are recording dreams in the middle of the night and don’t want an iPhone’s screen to wake you. I also recommend a dream journal app called Elsewhere.to (not affiliated, just a user who enjoys the features and the developers). Again, stay in bed and as still as possible. If you immediately begin shuffling around or jump right out of bed, the majority of the dream evaporates like steam off a coffee mug.

Fragments are fine. A color, an emotion, a single image. Write it down anyway. You’re training your psyche to trust that you’re listening, and over time, it becomes easier to recall because attention tends to signal importance. Corporations have learned this, which is why so many of them are desperate for your attention.

When I bring dreams to a group, and I run dream groups for exactly this reason, something unique tends to happen. Other people see angles I literally cannot see because I’m inside it. My blind spots are someone else’s obvious observation. The Ullman Method makes this safe. Nobody tells you what your dream means. They offer what it would mean if it were theirs.

There are other methods, too, such as active imagination, but I won’t belabor this here; I’ve written about it elsewhere. It’s worth knowing the dream doesn’t necessarily end when you wake up.

The Mail You’re Getting Every Night

Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators, said every dream is like a letter from the Self.

Unlike mail, dreams don’t sit in your mailbox waiting for you to check them midweek. They risk being lost if you don’t write them down. Nine years ago, I began by opening one letter, and it was like a medical bill: In order to be healed, payment is required immediately, end your marriage, and the version of your life you thought you were supposed to live. Payment envelope enclosed.

That price was worth paying, and that is why I continue to open the letters, because dreams have constantly reminded me of everything that truly matters.

What dream have you dismissed recently that might be worth opening?