Dreamtime Dreamscape: Horses and snakes

I guess sometimes I have a dream with a message to it. This last dream was about ecology and diversity in nature, I suppose.

There was a train. The train really isn't important, except I used it to get to the jungle.

The jungle was small, located inside the train tracks, which wound a large circle around this basin, in which the jungle grew. Outside the jungle was scrub lands. It was very isolated.

Inside the isolated jungle were some native people. They had lived in the jungle for generations. I was trying to live with them, to learn their ways and to keep them safe. There was a sense of urgency about my task. If I didn't prove that these people deserved to live there, big bad companies were going to destroy the jungle.

The indigenous people had one thing they could sell. Horses.

Not just any horses, these were the best horses in the world. They were smaller than normal horses, and they had very long lives, and were more like pets than draft animals. I realized the only way to save the people was to have them produce enough horses for sale that the big companies couldn't destroy the land.

I was determined to help figure out how to breed more horses.

Now, the jungle was full of dangerous things to these horses, things that would kill the horses at any chance. The main killer of horses were snakes. They jungle floor was infested with snakes, but the snakes couldn't climb trees, they were bound to the ground. The snakes were each about two feet long, and each snake could eat a foal if it caught one before the humans could save the horse. I was told that hundreds of horses died from snakes until the people had come up with a way to save the horses.

They raised each horse inside a giant hanging ball. Each ball was just big enough for a foal, and had been made to have a mini-ecology inside it, complete with dirt, plants, and even a little drinking hole. The balls were surrounded by large hides of some long dead jungle mammal, and hung from a tree. The balls would then be suspended about a foot off the ground, which was too high for the snakes to reach.

It was almost like each ball was a pouch for the foals. Inside, the foal would be raised with the utmost care, allowed to wander and circle their ball (they ranged in size from 12 foot diameter to much larger, depending on how I was dreaming of them), and once the foal was horse-sized, allowed to leave the ball as they were then too big to be eaten by the snakes.

Now, they indigenous people had grown trees in a grid pattern to hold up these pouches, they were arranged in perfect order, four by four. It was the largest number of horses they could grow. I went through this scene in my dream, kind of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, only it was a little horse foal turning into a full grown pony and leaving it's protective ball for the first time.

I thought to myself the people had to raise more horses, but they didn't have the hides to make more pouches, so I decided to try my luck at making a cage for the foals. I found a nice square cave, put some bars around it and grew some plants inside. I thought it was perfect.

I had one of the people come and check my cage out. They told me without even going inside that it was a stupid idea and horses would be killed. I asked why, and the person told me about the snakes. (Even though I had explained to myself about the snakes, my dream self somehow didn't know about them and was shocked.) I looked inside and saw a bunch of hungry looking snakes inside and was horrified. I asked the person if there was any way to raise horses without the pouches. They said no.

I was coming up with some kind of plan to help the jungle, realizing that if I proved to the big companies that the horses would die without these people to raise them because the dangers of the jungle were so varied and so deadly. I knew there were only a few hundred horses left, and the snakes themselves were endangered because they only lived in this remote jungle. The whole thing, I decided, had to become a kind of remote nature preserve or both snakes and horses would die.

It was at that point that I woke up. It was a strange dream, horses growing in giant hide sacks, and snakes littering the ground so numerously that foals would automatically get eaten... I'm not sure what my brain was thinking or what the true point to the dream was.