Snakes don't dream

Snakes don't dream. Don't ask me how they found that out, please just accept it as a proven truth for the sake of the story.

I dare say that they wired up some poor reptile to a monitor (not a monitor lizard) and spent a few days observing it's brain impulses, but anyway, the scientific world now firmly believes that snakes do not have dreams, though what this has to do with shop-lifting is - as yet - unclear.

The implications of this simple fact are potentially enormous. For a start, if snakes do not dream it also means that they have no sub-conscious. If they have no sub-conscious, then they have no need of sleep. All they need to do is stop moving - really stop moving - for a while in order to give the cells in their body a little time to refresh themselves. It also means that they have no need of the services provided by Carl Jung and the gang, so they must save a fortune in psychoanalysis bills.

If they have no need of sleep, this must mean that they are permanently awake. If they are born wide awake, then exactly when was it that they first woke up? When were they imbued with consciousness? Inside their mother, or sometime before?

I always thought that the ancient Minoan and later Ancient Greek idea of snakes slithering between this world and the Underworld came about because they have no legs, so are permanently on the ground or under it when going down holes, but it is not as simple as that. Actually, it's even simpler.

The Greek myths have been interpreted by people like Carl Jung as personifying archetypal traits of the human psyche, and the Underworld is the place associated with sleep and the subconscious, as well as The Big Sleep which we all have to fall into at the end. The snake is the only creature which can go between this world and the other, as easily as you or I would walk through a door.

But what - I hear you ask - has this to do with shop-lifting? Well, I now think that is a subject for a different post, so the answer is - for now - nothing.