Law student Cath Anderson is plucked from her motorcycle in LA and finds herself at some time later, together with a group of other people, arriving to a very strange place: a planet in the system of Pollux (observed previously via the terrestrial planet finder), a subsurface forest world populated by giant snakes travelling along the pathways and tunnels, cleaning and reorganizing; a world of lost toys, sinister apparitions and forgotten and suppressed memories come to life; where there already is a sizable human population and some people act as spokesmen for the snakes, where both human pets brought to the planet with their owners and people are taken by the snakes for unknown purposes and giant pale mushrooms grow in the dark tunnels. The welcoming committee for the new arrivals explains some of the facts of living on the planet, but most of the activity the snakes and other denizens indulge in as well as the ecology of the planet is a mystery. What’s more, activity further in from Pollux towards the Norma galactic arm indicates that something much more involved and on a much larger scale goes on there, and some of the humans are selectively sent there (the disappeared ones?).

I have several inklings of the ecology of the planet, but they are vague as most dreams are. I will attempt to go back to sleep and try to get to that planet again. It seems to be quite a wondersome place as well as the first new location I have dreamt about for quite a while. While beautiful and feeling slightly safer than my usual city, there still is an undercurrent of menace in the air, and the massive galaxy-restructuring (?) activities further out certainly appear to be sinister in some way.

The snakes themselves are a bit frightening, but mostly because their sheer size and the nonchalance with which they snap up (but do not destroy?) objects in their way; they do not appear to be actively malevolent. If their human spokesmen are asked, they sometimes return whatever they have taken in perfectly good condition (as they did with three cats they picked up, apparently out of sheer curiosity, when I was there). Sometimes they don’t. I am not sure whether I was the woman protagonist, but I was certainly observing the action either directly through her eyes or just a bit to the side, so to speak.

The landscape was beyond weird: with deeply forested--and snowed under--patches right next to warm underground warrens, some quite organic, others apparently constructed from giant Lego blocks. Some of the passages between interior rooms appear to be non-euclidean in their geometry. Doors and other apertures open and close seemingly at random; other objects are brought with people from Earth (the motorcycle made it!).

And what about the human spokesmen for the inhabitants? Are they voluntary collaborators, or meat puppets? And what is the status of the snakes? Are they the masters of the world (and beyond) or simply worker drones?

OK, then, I am definitely going back there...see y'all in the morning!