In the middle of the night on Monday, Rachel Bloor woke up in her bed to find a heavy weight curled up against her chest.
Half asleep, he reaches for his dog – and instead finds himself petting a smooth, squishy object.
As Bloor retreated under the covers and pulled them up to his neck, his partner turned on the bedside lamp and confirmed the Brisbane couple’s fears.
“He went, ‘Oh boy. Don’t move. There’s like a 2.5m python on you,'” Bloor told the BBC.
His first words were insults. The second, an order to evacuate the dogs.
“I thought if my Dalmatian realized there was a snake in there… it would be dead.”
With the dogs hiding outside the room – and her husband wishing she was with them – Bloor began to carefully extricate herself.
“I was just trying to get out from under the covers … I was like, ‘Did this really happen? This is weird’.”
She believes the carpet python – which is non-venomous – stuck itself through the shutters on her window to her bed below.
Once freed from the python, he began to feed it back the way it came in.
“It’s so big that even when it’s hooked on me, its tail part isn’t even in the shutter.”
“I held him, (and) even then he wasn’t too scared.
The same cannot be said for her shocked husband, but Bloor herself is hardly afraid, having grown up on acres around snakes.
“I think if you calm down, they calm down.”
Whether it’s a cane toad — one of the nation’s most destructive, ugly pests — that’s another story, he said.
“I can’t stand them, like they make me dry. So if it’s a cane toad, it scares me.”
All animals and humans escaped from the interaction unharmed.
Carpet pythons are constrictors common in coastal areas of Australia, and usually feed on small mammals such as birds.