An Australian woman in Brisbane woke up in the middle of the night to discover a large carpet python coiled on her chest.
Rachel Bloor was sleeping when she felt a heavy weight pressing down on her. Still half-asleep, she reached out thinking it was her dog - only to touch smooth, moving scales instead.
As she pulled the covers up higher, her partner turned on the light and delivered the startling news: "Oh baby. Don't move. There's like a 2.5m python on you," she recalled telling the BBC.
Her immediate reaction involved some strong language, followed by urgent instructions to get the dogs out of the room. "I thought if my Dalmatian realised that there's a snake there, it's gonna be carnage," Bloor explained.
With the dogs safely removed and her husband wishing he could join them, Bloor carefully worked to slide out from under the snake. "I was just trying to shimmy out from under the covers. In my mind, I was going, 'Is this really happening? This is so bizarre'," she said.
She suspects the non-venomous carpet python had slipped through the window shutters and onto the bed below. Even after being curled around her, a part of its tail remained outside the window.
Once free, Bloor calmly guided the snake back out the same way it entered. "It was so big that even though it had been curled up on me, part of its tail was still out the shutter," she noted. "I grabbed him. Even then he didn't seem overly freaked out. He sort of just wobbled in my hand."
Her husband was far more shocked, but Bloor stayed composed - thanks to growing up around snakes on rural property. "I think if you're calm, they're calm," she said.
She joked that a cane toad (an invasive species) would have been far more frightening to her than the python.
Fortunately, everyone - humans and animals - emerged unharmed from the unusual encounter.
Carpet pythons are common non-venomous constrictors in Australia's coastal regions and typically prey on small animals like birds.