A dream within a dream: Anaconda and baby, told at the Dream Research Institute, Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education, 13th July 2025.

I am sleeping, lying naked in bed, and realise that there is a large anaconda moving inside me. I can feel it through my skin and it is very solid. It is mainly green, with black and yellow stripes, and white underneath. I wonder how it has got inside me. It makes eye contact with me and then puts its head down. In my dream I then wake up and realise that it is now not an anaconda but a baby inside me, which is soft. It is fully formed, at eight months, and is moving. I wonder, is this real? I know that now I know what it is like to have life inside me. Through my skin I can see that it is white, and my skin is light and golden. I know that he needs me and that I need him. I feel that the anaconda was female and the baby was male.       

Julia chose this page for the painting as it had a small (footnotes) paragraph for the anaconda at the bottom and a large paragraph for the baby at the top. She had also noticed the words 'The child' at the top left. During the discussion of the dream she saw further child and mother words on the page and incorporated them into the painting.

When the dreamer first told the dream at this event she started by saying it was a dream within a dream. Such false awakenings are rare, the person dreams they have awoken and knows that they have been dreaming up to that point, so the experience has similarities with lucid dreams, but the person then does not realise that they are still asleep and dreaming.