Dream of: 16 February 1997 (3) "Black Sitting Cobra"
seeing the beauty
in evil is the sign of
a perceptive eye
I was driving a car along Route 140, the paved state road which stretches through the hills between Portsmouth and Oak Hill. I was headed in the direction of Portsmouth. Suddenly something in the road caught my attention, and I realized I had just passed by a black cobra sitting with its head and a portion of its body raised up about thirty centimeters, steadied on the rest of its body which was wrapped in a coil on the ground.
I was just about to continue driving past, when suddenly I put on the brakes, came to a stop, and jumped out of the car, anxious to take a closer look at the cobra. I was concerned about the cobra's sitting in the road. I knew this was an unusual snake for this area, as I had certainly never seen one around here before. I wanted to scare the cobra off the road so it would not be run over. As I stood about two meters away from the cobra, I saw just how beautiful it was. It was completely black with its scales offset in dull gray.
Now I was in for yet another surprise: not five meters away, also on the road, were yet two more cobras, sitting in identical positions – their heads raised about thirty centimeters off the ground. Looking now more closely at the cobras, I realized they all appeared to be quite young, perhaps just born from a nearby nest. More than ever I saw that I needed to scare them off the road so they would not be run over.
However a new problem now confronted me: I had left the door to the car open, and my pet Dalmatians Picasso and Chaucer had jumped out and were running around close to the cobras. Frantically I began calling to the dogs and trying to scare away the cobras at the same time. I was soon successful at frightening off the cobras, all three of which suddenly slithered off the road into the weeds where they looked much shorter than I had anticipated – another sign that they were quite young.
My calling the dogs, however, was not quite as successful as scaring away the cobras: both dogs continued to ignore my calls as they ran back and forth across the road. Now I was becoming quite worried. I had stopped at a bend in the road, and I feared that if a car suddenly came around the curve, the car might run over the dogs. I realized I had made a mistake by stopping. It was true that the cobras had been beautiful and that they needed to be scared off the road, but I thought that I should have first thought about the dogs before stopping. I certainly did not want to see the dogs injured or killed, and my not thinking first about the dogs had been foolish. As harshly as I could, I screamed at the dogs, "Come here! Come here!"
I knew that sometimes the dogs could detect the earnestness in my voice when I spoke harshly to them, and that they were then more likely to respond. Indeed, the dogs did finally turn and head toward me.
I finally found myself riding a bicycle instead being in a car, and I motioned for the dogs to jump into a basket which I had on the front of the bicycle. I knew that being in the basket would be cramped for them, but the basket was all I had for them at the moment.
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