The Yellow Snake

A yellow snake followed me for years, long before I understood what it meant.

For years, I didn't remember any of my dreams , maybe I simply didn't want to. Yet every time someone brought up dreams or their meaning, a chill ran through my body, because a bad dream from my childhood would start circling in my head again. Even when I tried to forget it, that image stayed there, hidden somewhere in my memory.

Where it all began

When I was seven, we lived in a big house on the outskirts of the city, and to get from school to home I had to take three buses. The house had three bedrooms and a large living room. The front was beige with green iron bars on the windows. A family lived there with their three children and their grandmother, who was retired. She spent her time taking care of some Australian birds and her greenhouse full of flowers, roses, and plants in the yard.

In the yard there were also two unpainted rooms with cement walls and floors. They had no doors, just the space where doors should have been. Those were the rooms we rented. To get to our room, we had to walk down a long hallway. In one room there were two beds and a dresser where we kept our clothes. My mom and I slept in one bed; my brother and sister in the other. A piece of wine-red fabric served as a curtain for the doorway.

In the second room we had a kerosene stove where we cooked, and a large table my mom used for her sewing, because she was a seamstress. We also had a little dog that kept us company in that simple space.

The Yellow Snake

One night I saw a yellow snake, thick and long. It was on the wall, right above the opening that served as a door, stretched out against the gray cement. I got scared and screamed: "A snake!"

My mom jumped up to help me, grabbed a broom to scare it away, I think it fled down the hallway. I woke up frightened and crying, not knowing what was happening, whether it was real or not; but the feeling of fear was so real that it stayed with me for many years. I don't remember if I told my mom about the dream, maybe I didn't. Something inside me decided not to dream, or to remember any dreams — not even that snake.

The Encounter with Quetzalcóatl

Many years later, after I had already built a life in Canada, I came back from a few vacation days in Mexico. One day at the office, a colleague asked me about my trip. We talked about the pyramids and I mentioned I couldn't remember the name of one of them. He said: "Quetzalcóatl."

I remembered that the Aztecs called the feathered serpent by that name. In that moment, something in my mind just clicked. And I remembered my dream. The thing I had feared so much as a child... I never wanted to know what that snake symbolized or what that dream was trying to tell me; I believed it was something bad, so I always ignored it. But hearing that name brought the dream back to me immediately.

My animal guides in Canada

Now I realize the snake was the first animal that stayed with me.

Living in Canada, animals accompany me in a different way.

Deer appear constantly near me, sometimes whole families, groups of four or even twelve moving together with a quiet elegance. I see them crossing the bushes or resting on the snow, always aware of one another.

I've noticed that if one of them falls behind, they stop and wait until that one catches up. I love watching them. I can spend a long time observing how they move as a family, looking for food and looking out for each other.

The capacity to transform fear

Today I live in Canada, and when I look back at that childhood — short on material things but surrounded by my family's love — I understand that the snake in my dream wasn't only speaking to me about fear.

If you've ever wondered whether childhood dreams carry meaning, I believe they do. Sometimes they accompany us through life, waiting until we're ready to understand what they were trying to say. The animals, my companions, guide me and reflect my path.

Maybe the snake stayed with me because some parts of ourselves only make sense years later.