In the dream a snake had made its way out of the sea. It was long and heavy and made its way with slow determination towards me. It lifted its head to move on top of me, dragging its body up behind it until it had completely left the sand and was lying in coils on my chest. In the dream I reckoned that it didn’t know I was a live person, but that if I as much as breathed it would sense the movement and smell either danger or dinner. Either way I was finished. I had to act first while the snake was falling asleep in ignorance.

With no weapons and no way of getting from under the creature to run from it there was only one way that I could resolve the situation. I grabbed the thing at both ends and bit it in two. That’s when I woke.

I woke into a world that so different from the world I had fallen asleep in. By now the moon was sitting directly in front of me, a huge silver disc in an ink black vault of pin-prick stars and nothingness. The ripples of the sea lapped the shore they caught the silvery light shining from above and threw it back towards me. Palm fronds rattled overhead like a clutch of garden canes as a gentle breeze moved them about, and the once-sweet air was now taken over by the malevolent stench of evil.

I knew instantly that it had all been a dream, but I felt crawled over, violated. The foul taste in my mouth couldn’t be dissociated from the bite I’d taken from the dry, scaly flank of the imaginary snake and I had no food or drink to take to overcome it. This was not where I wanted to be, but I was determined to see the night through, and if I was honest, I was afraid on moving from that protected arc of sand onto the exposed beach to get to the sleeping village. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, but to remain unnoticed by the moon, the stars, the sea.

I forced myself to lie down again, using reason but still checking that no mutilated serpent was lying on the sand beside me. Somehow I slept.

Morning arrived, and with it the cheerful voices of fishermen that broke the cruel spell of the night as they returned from the sea. The air was cold and the village was not yet awake. It was hard to think about moving from the warmth of my blanket, but I stood up, stiff from lying on the hard mattress of tightly packed sand. I shook sand from my tousled hair, and from my clothes, and as I lifted my head to look across the beach towards the retreating line of the sea I saw about twelve long snakes lying dotted around the hollow my body had just left on the ground. They were no more than five meters in each direction from my bed, and each snake had a blood-encrusted wound where its head had been torn off, and the heads were nowhere to be seen.