Despie the fact that neither he nor my mother have ever wanted a cat, they've fallen in love with little Pippin surprisingly quickly! 😆
In this dream "kissing the snake" was well-known as a euphemism for doing drugs in this way (as in, fishing it out of the snake's mouth with your tongue), and more broadly as an idiom for taking a chance on something sketchy; if you got scammed, your friends would say something like "you kissed the snake, dude, that's on you". Some believed the venom present in the snake's fangs would enhance their experience of the drugs, which was where the practice first originated.
Culturally, it became custom to deal illegal drugs by putting them in rubber snakes instead, to avoid the safety concerns associated with actual snake corpses. It was considered a great show of trust if someone didn't make you "kiss the snake" to take the drug, removing it from the snake's mouth and offering it to you by hand instead. Alternatively, it was disrespectful if you insisted on not "kissing the snake" without being offered, as it indicated you didn't trust the drug was actually present in the snake's mouth, and you thought you were being scammed.
I think I need to incorporate this into worldbuilding now???
(The image is not of an actual dead snake btw--this is a hognose, a genus of snakes known for playing dead. Fun fact for the day!)
In that moment I believe I truly became the Joker. Just cinematic