The other night I had a dream that I was at school, and one of my professors, we'll say Professor Y, had all these animals in his classroom, including a yellow snake with red eyes and huge black fangs. The snake was extremely venomous, but no one seemed to care except me. I tried to warn everyone that the snake was going to kill us all, and begged Professor Y to get rid of it. But no one paid attention. At one point it escaped. Again I pled, again no one cared. Even after it tried to bite Professor Y, making a troubling hissing/popping sound, everyone eas perfectly okay with the snake. The snake also got cut in half at one point, but that didn't affect its strength or its deadliness. This was a very very scary snake.
Sidenote: I'm not afraid of snakes as a rule. I am afraid of things that can kill me.
Anyway, rather than try to get rid of the snake, Professor Y asked me to LOOK AFTER the damned thing, making sure it stayed out of trouble. At this point the snake changed into a snake-cat, with a furry cat head and two vestigial cat legs, but still cut in half. And still with the giant black fangs. It became friendlier to me, brushing up against me and letting me pet it, but I still feared that it would bite me and kill me at any moment.
Then, the snake-cat climbed into some kind of heater. I figured it would be okay, so I let it alone. Then the heater started smoking so I opened it up and got the snake-cat out. It was completely grey, and a large patch if its skin was burned to a crisp. I said, "Kitty? Kitty? Are you okay?" Then I saw that it was still breathing, so I figured it had survived. I went back to what I was doing, figuring that I'd get it to a vet or something when I was done. I looked back and saw that it was up and moving around again. The skin was no longer singed, but it was still grey, and it was moving around a lot more slowly and was no longer the least bit threatening.
My subconscious is not very subtle. Here's my dimestore dream analysis.
The snake is the write-on. I spent two weeks trying to convince everyone around me that the write-on was a bad thing, but no one cared. Everyond thought it was okay. So I had no choice but to take on the write-on myself, and once I did it became less threatening, part cat (I like cats), and part friendly cat at that. But there was still the danger that it would turn on me and destroy me (i.e., I would blow my Spring Break working on it and be rejected by Law Review like the Stanford Law applicant that I am). The whole heater thing represents the fragility of the write-on, the realization that it can be strengthened or weakened at the whim of the current Law Review staff. The fact that it climbed into the heater by itself shows that it's capable of destroying itself, by making people hate it so much that they become Law Review members and weaken and/or eliminate it (i.e. by bringing grades into the picture).
Which, hopefully, is exactly what's going to happen.
Another lovely rendition of the "Snake-Cat" is on display in the North Wing of the Getty museum in the book where school children are supposed to draw their favorite mascot. Next to the drawing is the caption "I like the pipe box", referring of course to the legendary pipe box in the South Wing which features a "grotesque" smoking a pipe out of it's ass.
Did I mention my mother was with us when we were examining the pipe box?
Pipe box! Woo!
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/oz6824.html