An Australian woman was awoken by her hissing cat early Sunday to find a python wrapped around her two-year-old daughter.

Tess Guthrie, a 22-year-old from Lismore, New South Wales, discovered the 6-foot python wrapped three times around her daughter's arm.

"I thought I was having a nightmare," Guthrie told a local television news station. "It was only because the cat was hissing that I woke up and saw the snake with its body wrapped around my daughter Zara’s arm."

The toddler was sleeping in the bed with Guthrie, who pried the snake off her. But before she could, the non-venomous python bit the infant three times on her left hand.

"In my head I was just going through this unbelievable terror, and my thought was that it was going to actually kill her at first, because it was wrapped so tight," Guthrie told the Brisbane Times. "Her little arm was bleeding really bad from the bites, and all I could feel was blood and Zara was screaming by that stage, and I was in hysterics because it was such a shocking thing to wake up to. It was just terrifying."

Zara taken to a local hospital where she was treated and released. The coastal python (or "carper snake") was captured by a local wildlife official and eventually released back into the wild.

"The snake [had] not in any way, shape or form intended to eat the baby," Tex Tillis, who runs Tex's Snake Removals, told the Daily Telegraph. "It was trying to have a group hug."

"Pythons, underneath their bottom jaw, have a row of sensors which enable them to see the world in terms of infrared pictures," Tillis explained. "So in the dark they're going to see a baby as this warm spot."