The Snake That Could Not Be Seen

On a warm, dusty, June morning in an East Texas town, I had the most amazing personal demonstrations of how our brains work to filter and censor what we see through our eyes. It changed the way I viewed the world, and people, as "factual" reality. The year was 1976. I was three months away from being thirty years old. I had a baby boy who would turn two years old in October. We lived on the edge of town in a rent house that my friends and family all agreed was haunted. I believe the house was alive with something, but I don't know for sure that it was ghosts, at least, not the kind most folks believe in. Many very strange events happened there in the three years that we lived there, but the one event that has had the most impact upon me, personally, had nothing to do with ghosts or spirits of any kind.

Here in East Texas, the soil is white and powdery. The old timers call it "sugar sand". It turns the water when it rains it is so fine. Little white puffs of dust rise around your feet when you walk across a patch without grass..and believe me, in a dry season, there are lots of patches without grass. Otherwise, this area is the most humid and green place I have ever been fortunate enough to live in. But, in June, two months after the last rains, the soil is soft and powdery. And by 10:00 A.M. the temperature was beginning to rise toward the 100ºF mark on the thermomenter.

I had put my son down for his nap and had taken a basket of wet laundry out to hang up on the clothes line. I had on a pair of old cut-offs and I was bare footed, which is my usual state most of the time, even in my old age. The wonderful silence that consists of bird songs, buzzing insects, and the distant sound of the train passing through town a couple of miles away was so relaxing as I bent over and picked up a piece of wet clothing and pinned it to the line with wooden clothes pins. This is a repetitive activity and I was in no hurry as I listened to the world around me.

Suddenly, I heard a very clear voice in my head! The voice simply said one word: "Snake". It was very unemotional, very calm sound, and I was so startled by it that I stopped dead in the middle of a movement. I looked down at the sand at my feet. I stood perfectly still and looked all around where I was standing. I peered down into the clothes basket, very carefully. I stood like that for, at least, a full minute taking my time and looking very carefully at the ground. A snake in East Texas is nothing to fool around with or take lightly.

Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I resumed the repetitive motion of bending and straightening, pinning the piece of cloth on the line. About another minute passed when, again, I heard that masculine voice in my head calmly state only one word: "Snake". I finished hanging that piece up and decided that perhaps I had better look a bit closer for the snake that might really be there. Standing in place, I slowly turned very carefully to face behind me; careful to move my feet as little as it took to get turned. I scanned the ground and all I could see was smooth white sugar sand with a few thousand doodle bug funnels. There was nothing else to see besides my feet and the clothes basket for a twenty foot radius.

Still, something held me in place. I had a feeling that I was missing something important, but my eyes kept telling me that there was nothing there. My gut was telling me that I had better not move. I wasn't afraid because I like snakes, but I respect them most highly, as well. I was more curious at this point because of the voice I had heard. I was just about on the verge of thinking that I might be a hair off the normal path as far as my brain was concerned, when I noticed what looked to be a trail in the sand like a child had pulled a stick through it. Or as if I had tried to draw a wiggly line picture in the sand with my finger.

I literally forced my eyes to follow the trail from the time it appeared from the grass into the sand. The trail ended about a foot from my bare feet, but I saw nothing there. It just stopped. There were no other marks or prints around the area where it stopped. My mind would not let it go and I stood there looking at "nothing" in the sand.

Finally, I squatted down on my haunches, knees on my chest and my butt was about an inch off the ground.I did not dare move my feet. I reached out down the trail as far away from my body as I could reach and slowly put my finger in the sand. I dragged my finger, barely touching the sand, up the trail slowly, until I touched the tail of the snake where the trail stopped at my feet.

The snake twitched when I touched it, and I saw it simultaneously with my touch. It had been there all along! I had looked for it for, at least, five minutes and had not been able to see it with my eyes. It took touching it for me to see it, and for very good reason. Being from Texas, everything is bigger, or so the joke goes. In this case, the snake was a snake that I know well, or at least I thought it was a common snake. Once I could see it, it did not frighten me, because I was familiar with seeing these little buggers in the grass and hanging in tree limbs all the time. I thought it was a vivid grass- green grass snake lying in stark white sugar sand, only I believed that grass snakes only grew to be about 12 inches long and pencil thin. This beautiful beasty was all of two feet long and about 5 inches around and had a very large head!

Once I had disturbed it, it lazily meandered off into the grass on the other side of the yard as I stood gaping at it. My brain was going into warp-drive as I contemplated what had just happened to me. I finally understood that the reason I could not, initially, "see" the snake in all it's brilliant glory was because I did not THINK they could grow so big. I had never heard of anyone telling of a grass snake that large. I had never read of this larger possibility in any book I had read about snakes.

I could feel an entire world of understanding blossom in my brain about how this organ works to prevent us from encountering anything outside our normal conditioning. This action, or rather, reaction, to things outside our realm of "normal" belief and reality, is there to prevent us from going into shock when something very different presents itself before our eyes. The brain's answer to anomalies in our reality is to bypass the event entirely.

Good Gracious! Monsters could be walking all around and among us and just because they look so different from human beings and the expected beings we ARE aware of, we would never know they are there. Because our brains won't allow our eyes to "see" them. Because if we do not believe in something, or even if we are simply unaware that something exists, our brains "protect" us from becoming aware of it.

My view of life changed. I think quantum physics could even throw in an explanation that perhaps my looking for a snake, created a snake to satisfy my brain. All I know for sure is that I do not always trust my eyes, now. And I always listen for a quiet voice from inside, or a feeling inside my skin, as to what is truly in my environment.

This story is as close to my actual experience as I can tell it. I welcome any other comments, explanations, and scenarios of the brain anyone cares to make regarding an event like this. I do not do drugs, not even prescription drugs. I drink a beer or a glass of wine several times a year and other than that, I am and always have been quite healthy. Just to nip those comments before they begin...however, I laugh at myself and I'm not adverse to cute jokes. Ya'll think! =o)