Snakes

Snakes are the anticipated threat in Perry Smith’s recurring dream of a solitary tree bearing diamonds. The creature guards the treasure, crushes Perry when he reaches for it, and begins to swallow him; in the dream’s larger pattern, however, the snake never completes that act, because Perry’s yellow parrot devours it. The snake thus stands at the center of a dream in which desire, danger, and rescue repeatedly converge.

The Snake and the Diamond Tree

Perry tells Dick that he has had the same dream since childhood. In an African jungle, he moves toward a tree standing alone, its blue leaves hung with diamonds as large as oranges. The tree smells foul enough to make him sick, but its beauty and the promise of treasure draw him toward it. He knows in advance that a snake lives in the branches and will fall on him as soon as he reaches for a diamond.

Perry weighs the danger against the prize and chooses to take his chances: he wants the diamonds more than he fears the snake. The threat is therefore not a surprise to him. It is the known price attached to something he wants, and the dream advances through the tension between foreknowledge and action.

Attack and Anticipated Defeat

As Perry pulls a diamond from the tree, the snake lands on him. They wrestle, but he cannot get hold of the slippery creature. It crushes him, and he hears his legs cracking before it begins to swallow him feet first, like sinking into quicksand. The dream’s danger moves from a visible attacker to the prospect of being engulfed; the treasure-seeking encounter becomes a struggle for survival.

Perry hesitates while telling this part of the dream because Dick is occupied with gouging under his fingernails with a fork and seems uninterested. When Dick asks whether the snake swallows him, Perry stops short and says the ending does not matter. The narrator makes clear that it matters deeply to him: Perry fears Dick might laugh at the dream’s parrot, and cannot bear the thought of that ridicule.

The Parrot’s Intervention

The omitted ending belongs to a wider dream pattern Perry has shared with Willie-Jay, whom he regards as delicate-minded and understanding. Since Perry was a child, a towering yellow bird, like a parrot, has appeared as a protector. In the earliest remembered version, it came after a nun beat him for wetting his bed in a California orphanage. The bird blinded and killed the nuns, then gently carried Perry away to paradise.

As Perry grew older, the figures from whom the bird rescued him changed: older children, his father, a faithless girl, and an Army sergeant took the nuns’ place. The parrot remained. In this recurring structure, the snake guarding the diamond tree never finishes devouring Perry; the bird devours the snake instead, and Perry rises to a place of safety and abundance.

Dream Function

The snake’s role is defined by its opposition to the diamonds and by its eventual defeat. It embodies the danger Perry already expects to find on the way to what he desires, while the parrot reverses the apparent outcome: the creature that seems capable of swallowing him is itself swallowed. The dream does not remove the threat or make the struggle painless—Perry still imagines being crushed—but it gives the danger an ending in which he is rescued.

That ending is also private and vulnerable. Perry withholds it from Dick, whose joking response to the conversation contrasts with the care Willie-Jay gives the dream. The snake therefore belongs not only to Perry’s imagery of peril, but to a story he is willing to tell fully only to someone he believes will understand its rescue.