An elderly Brisbane man has been bitten on the hand by a snake he found slithering across his neck as he slept early this morning.

Max Mason, 79, said he woke to find the metre-long carpet python on him about 2:00am as he slept in his Ascot house.

"I felt a cold feeling slithering across the side of my neck. It woke me up. I had the feeling it was a snake slithering across my neck," he said.

"I grabbed it and threw it on the floor and switched the bedroom light on and sure enough it was a snake."

Mr Mason said he was bitten on the hand as he threw the snake off him.

"It was quite a shock, quite a surprise ... I think a bigger shock for my wife than myself," he said.

Mr Mason said his wife managed to contain the snake with a plastic bin.

"I think it's a once-in-the-lifetime sort of thing, good heavens, you wouldn't expect a snake to be slithering across your neck in the night as a regular occurrence," he said.

"We've had tree snakes and pythons, the back of our house backs onto a cliff face, but nothing in the house of course.

The carpet python bit Mr Mason on the left hand. ( Supplied: Judy Mason )

"Our house is fully screened, it's surprising how anything ever got in there, but it got in."

Mr Mason was taken to Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital where he will be monitored for 24 hours.

The Masons plan to release the python back into the wild.

Carpet pythons common in Brisbane: snake catcher

Carpet pythons are the most common snake found in Brisbane, followed by the tree snake, Queensland snake catcher and veteran herpetologist David Farrimond said.

He said Mr Mason was very unlucky to find the snake in his bed.

"It's only about the third time I've heard of it happening in about 30 years," Mr Farrimond said.

"Sometimes they turn up in toilets as well. They get in the sewerage system and they end up in the bowl of the toilet, and people don't see them, and they lift the lid and there it is."

Mr Farrimond said urban density was bringing people into more contact with snakes.

"I don't believe that snakes are increasing, I think it's the development that's increasing and encroaching on their habitat more often," he said.

Today's bite follows on from a number of snake incidents in Queensland this week.

Pictures were widely shared online of a large python eating a fully grown wallaby near Cairns earlier this week.

A brown snake was also caught on camera eating a carpet python in Goodna, west of Brisbane, on Monday afternoon.

That same day a woman was bitten by a wild green tree snake at Australia Zoo north of Brisbane.

She was taken to hospital as a precaution.