The last few nights I’ve had dreams populated by people who do not exist in real life, and dreamscapes which are a hybrid of the dreamworld and reality. The setting for one was Quitman, Georgia, the downtown area, but where there is a convenience store, in the dream  was a wooden building, old and sturdily built, which housed a hardware store.

            I didn’t go inside, but outside, a window that had been boarded up, and bars installed, had a live snake visible and its pattern changed so it was either a rat snake or a water snake. A young man was standing there talking to me, and I knew he worked for the store. A woman appeared, she was thirty something and scantily dressed, but neither she nor the boy were afraid of the snake. Suddenly, the window was full of snakes, rat snakes now, and the boy picked one up and offered to sell it to me. The woman also began to pitch her wares, and it took me a minute to realize what she was trying to do.

            The boy began talking to a woman who was slightly afraid of snakes, and the scantily clad woman leaned over with a leer and whispered, “What makes you think I’m not a whore?”

I woke up.