Roses and Rattlesnakes

              I dreamed that I was walking out in the Rose Garden of the Dream City. It was much like the rose garden in San Diego, except that it had thick forest on one edge and the bustling city on the other. It was also full of the warning buzz of rattlesnakes.
              NotN (my companion for this dream was a petite brunette with short strait hair and a generous figure who was somehow close to being N, but not really her) was concerned that the rattlesnakes were a danger, so I stepped into the garden to see what they were agitated about. It seems that someone had cast a spell that created little rodent sized heat blobs, and those blobs were enticing the snakes into striking at empty air, or at the people at the edge of the park. The snakes were confused and frightened, and thus were rattling out their warning to the world. I managed to use a little bit of magic to cool down the snakes I could see, slowing them to the point that I could pick them up and move them across the ravine into the forest. I carried about a dozen snakes out of the rose garden before we came across a terrified homeless woman.
              The woman sat on a small utility box, wrapped in a blanket and sitting next to a blue tarp. The blue tarp moved slightly, obviously inhabited by a large snake of some sort. I made my way around to the other side of her, tracking one of the warm blobs as it landed on her shoe. I snatched a striking rattlesnake just behind its head.
              "Don't move, there's more!" I told the woman.
              She froze. "I didn't even know there were snakes in the Rose Garden."
              "Not usually, these were lured here," I explained, "some not so practical joker has tricked them into infesting the garden and walks. They're frightened and starving."
              I noticed the five inch thickness of a coil of large timber snake in the folds of the blue tarp.
              "Can I borrow your tarp for a minute?"
              "Sure, can I move yet?"
              "As soon as I take the tarp away." All through the conversation I was wresting with the small rattlesnake, and the effort was preventing me from focusing on making any sort of spell. NotN brought over one of our canvas shopping bags and I dumped the small snake into it. I had the time to admire the intricate pattern of its scales and wonder what species it was, as I didn't recognize the almost blue-grey and brown pattern from any snake I'd ever seen.
              I wrapped on of the handles of the back around the opening, tying it off. I turned to the tarp and felt the words of power forming in my soul and being echoed out in the world. A chill ran through the tarp and enveloped the snake within. As I was shaping the spell I could feel the enormous size of the snake. I waited for its movements to slow and then bundled up the tarp and ran for the ravine, NotN close behind with the shopping bag held out at arm's length.
              The homeless woman got up to run, but I shouted back at her to wait, "I'll bring back your tarp."
              "Tha's okay, you keep it!" She shouted and ran out of the garden into the city.
              There was more rattlesnake roundup after that, as well as carefully breaking up the decoy spell. I didn't like the decoy spell part. Messing with other people's spells is an invitation to trouble. This time the caster was long gone, but it was obvious from the spell that the homeless woman, and others like her, were the actual targets of the caster's wrath, and there was plenty of that in the making of the heat decoys. I could feel it leak out from each decoy that I unknotted as I traced my way to the funerary urn that was the focus of the spell.