Bad dreams, we’ve all had them. I had a rather odd one today though and it was just as I was dosing off to sleep. I was asleep enough to dream but woke with a start when the dream turned somewhat frightening. I don’t pay a lot of attention to my dreams but this one struck me odd.
I was in an area that was surrounded by extremely tall chain link fences. Oddly, there were rats everywhere. I wasn’t particularly scared of the rats but I felt this need to warn a companion who was trying to escape the cage. She was older than me by several years and I was pleading with her to get away from the rats. She wouldn’t listen and so I surprised myself by calling out to her: “It’s the rats with no tails you need to worry about.” I woke with a start and it was disturbing.
I couldn’t understand such an odd dream and although I am not into dream analysis I searched online for any clue. I ran across this entry from Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
“…A similar incident occurred in Hanoi, Vietnam, under French colonial rule. The colonial regime created a bounty program that paid a reward for each rat killed.[3] To obtain the bounty, people would provide the severed rat tail. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, lop off their tails, and then release them back into the sewers so that they could procreate and produce more rats, thereby increasing the rat catchers’ revenue.[5] Historian Michael Vann argues that the cobra example from British India cannot be proven, but that the rats in Vietnam case can be proven, so the term could be changed to the “rat effect”.
White Courtesy Telephone 