Snakes ? Really ?

One thing I've discovered in recent years is that the earlier I go to bed, the harder it is for me to sleep straight through the night. If I finish reading and turn off the bedside lamp before midnight, it's fairly certain that I'll be having strange dreams and stumbling back and forth to the bathroom all night. It's apparently a biological peculiarity.

Last night I revisited the welfare department dream I've written about previously, with a new twist. As usual, I've returned to the agency following my retirement, but I have no particular job title or assigned duties. The other characters in the dream are men and women that I worked with over a period of 20 years or so, all looking exactly as they did when I first met them (regardless of when that was).

As the dream begins, I'm attending a staff meeting of some kind where a directive from State Office is being discussed. The commissioner wants to implement a plan in which agency personnel are to have snakes. For the remainder of the dream, I'm going from person to person, office to office, seeking clarification: Are we actually supposed to carry the snakes with us, or will merely having them available be sufficient ? Where do we go to get our snakes ? What will the distribution system be ?

Near the end of the dream, I'm talking to a woman who was a caseworker I once supervised; the topic of our conversation is snakes. I'm holding a balloon on a string, and because I'm weightless, the balloon lifts me and I start drifting, suspended a foot or so above the floor.

Around the time I began floating, the dream faded and I woke up. I never did get answers to my questions about the new snake policy, but during my career there were actual policies that mystified me, too --- so, what's new ?