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Friday morning, 13 October 1972.

The Pink Snake that Tried to Follow Me Home

Dream # 2,125-04.

While dreaming, I have dream state awareness, but I do not change the ongoing implication that is only mildly annoying. I occasionally feel vague abdominal cramps through the veil of sleep, aware of my status but without pain.

A small, skinny Pepto Bismol pink snake follows me through the empty halls of my middle school but is always a few feet behind me. I do not attempt to run from it. I perceive it as friendly but annoying. I do not think about whether it is venomous or not.

I look back and see it atop a row of lockers. It almost seems to be grinning, more with friendly curiosity, not a threat. It sometimes hides.

At one point, I wonder if it might be a relative, perhaps an uncle visiting from Wisconsin whom I have not met, or even my grandfather. Its essence is more like part of a cartoon in contrast to being realistic.

I continue to walk north, going home to Cubitis from Arcadia. (I never walked this route in real life as it was too far.) I walk through abstract and undefined spaces (some with indoor-outdoor ambiguity, others merely abstract), though still focused on returning home (even though I am already home and in bed sleeping).

As I think less about the snake and more about walking home, I realize it is probably not following me anymore. I decide to teleport home, which brings about wakefulness as I teleport.

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I have had many dreams where my dream self perceives deliberately waking up as teleporting. This error in thinking (in ambiguous metacognitive or liminal states that most dream writers pretend do not exist) is no different than protoconsciousness referring to a dream as a “movie.” It is flawed dynamic imagination and natural virtual amnesia (incomplete pathways from not being conscious). There is no reason to be stupid about it.

The snake in this dream is Pepto Bismol pink. (I drank a lot of Pepto Bismol when I was a child and did not find out until recently that children under 12 should not drink it.)

Pink is rarely a color that noticeably occurs in my dreams but is more often Pepto Bismol pink - which I always have the dream state awareness of as being so and sometimes become annoyed at how the color is “interfering” with my dream’s narrative, though all pink is not exclusively so. I usually do not put “meaning” into specific colors unless I understand what they “represent” while in the dream state.

Snakes (with no “convenient” singular “meaning”) sometimes appear in my dreams when I have abdominal cramps with indigestion. (This causality was more common in childhood.) This factor is not “interpretation” (which I know is an asinine fallacy) but the realization of underlying dream content influence, not opinion or pretending, as so many do. One association I have always had is a snake’s similarity to the human intestine because of its size and shape. There are many dreams more specific under this influence. (An additional factor relates to a boa constrictor squeezing a person’s abdomen.) Ultimately, snakes appear in dreaming experiences for many reasons in the realms of imagination, but the connection to the human intestine remains predominant for me (other than the vivid but generic waking alert/RAS dream outcomes).

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Morning of August 24, 1970. Monday.



This dream, I consider one of my most significant and “unexplainable” childhood dreams, as well as it being one of the longest of the time period. I called it “The Old Shack” in my original childhood journal. My dream’s back story started by three classmates and I (Tina L, Brenda W, and best friend Toby T) doing a real-life-based childish routine on the song “Sugar Shack” and pretending to mess up in timing, and going “whoops, it exploded… boom!” …“accidentally” (on purpose) flowing into the Nancy Sinatra song “Sugar Town”. School had gotten out June 5th this year.

My dream featured a strange old (fictional) wooden building (a “sugar shack” I had supposed - but not really - one room had an old bed we all “slept” on which seemed to be oriented from the middle of the south wall) where one room on the north end of the main room seemed sort of “burned” or dark, with very loose and missing floorboards as well as missing wall and ceiling parts - and appeared in different ways at different times (in terms of age). The only other feature in this shack of note are ragged curtains with only about fifty percent of the cloth left. There was a strong emotional focus on my dream at the time, but I did not know why. My dream also had typically recurring elements. The juvenile (in this case) “four in a bed” concept likely but innocently could have been inspired by promos (or newspaper theater advertisements) for “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, though I had no idea what the movie related to other than from the Mad Magazine parody us four read in real life (and of course did not really find that amusing - and it certainly did not encourage us into looking forward to being “idiotic” adults, though I usually enjoyed most features in Mad Magazine), though I do not know the day it was bought - the cover date says September 1970, but it likely was available in June 1970 or earlier. The hair color (three dark, one blonde) matched, and I had a brother-in-law named Bob and a sister (not Bob’s wife) named Carol.

In my dream, a normal rabbit (possibly modeled after my mother’s pet rabbit Cindy, though it seemed wild in my dream) had gone through the doorway that led in and out of the unusual room (though the floor did not seem strong enough or complete enough to walk on or even to actually enter the room). Later, it was a giant rabbit (bigger than a horse), but was not dangerous in any way. There is also a part where a snake grows larger but does not threaten us - though we do see it crawl past the open front door (on the east side of the building - the back door being on the west side), being about half the height of the doorway and this concerns Tina. At one point (when events are getting to a point where we need to leave), she says (in her “fake” British accent) “…but what about the rabbit?”

Tina had placed a sparrow with a broken wing through the doorway at one point, and it had begun to grow larger. It eventually becomes a pterodactyl after flying over the shack and she seems a bit concerned about what she did. She also puts an old wilted bouquet of flowers (from the southwest dusty corner of the large room) through the doorway and the blooms become fresh. I am not sure how the room works at any point. Does it move through time (thus causing other things to change), or just make things bigger at times? I can understand how the sparrow became a pterodactyl if prehistoric “throwbacks” (as well as futuristic ones) are implied with time shifting, but that does not explain why the rabbit (and snake) - as well as my thumb near the last scene - just became larger.

My friend Toby (who is wearing a cheap wristwatch) sticks his hand through the doorway to “test” it somehow (based on curiosity about how other things that had happened - such as the restoration of part of the torn curtain to becoming complete and like new) and ends up with a changed watch that is complex and computerized - there even seems to be a miniature slot machine video game on it (before I ever saw or heard of computer games as such). In real life, years later, such things actually existed as seen in my dream years before, which I found quite interesting.

Near the final scenario, I had placed my right hand through the doorway and my thumb cramped up in great pain and grew nearly twice as large (I do not typically experience this level of pain in a dream).

My dream had ended by me trying to reach an apparently known “portal” after running out the back door (though I am not sure what influenced this - possibly a “Star Trek” episode) and across a mostly featureless large grassy field, around the same time that the reddish pterodactyl (that had transformed from the sparrow) made a shadow on the ground near me as I was running (and I assume that it was ready to attack me) and I just made it through the old isolated trellis which was being used as an arched gate as part of a broken fence - which was supposedly the “portal” from my dream into reality (and probably the “cure” for whatever the room in the shack had changed) - though I am beginning to only become slightly lucid at this point (the situation nearly identical in mood and physical awareness to the event in the “Dogpile” dream of 1972 where I leaped through the front door of my Cubitis home) as I saw the pterodactyl become a sparrow again, and fall to the ground just after crossing above the supposed “portal”. (The pterodactyl shadow is likely a replay of a real-life event concerning a buzzard flying over me, of which numerous dreams were influenced by.)

The outcome:

Exactly six years later in real life (August 24, 1976)…I was in the hospital, my right thumb enlarged to nearly twice the size (exactly as in my dream) due to a completely unexpected medical condition, caused by an unexplainable series of four (and a half) cysts, all the same size except for the new one just starting, which all apparently had embryonic properties as if my body suddenly decided to grow a few other siblings from my thumb (though this followed other dreams which were also precognitive to this event). There was not the slightest indication of this until the summer vacation of 1976 when I first noticed the first one growing (with no hints or known causes beforehand), but did not get it checked out until there were four in a row, and by that time, a fifth had started closer to my wrist.

The CBS late movie that was playing the night prior to the morning of my operation was “Night of the Lepus” from 1972 - about giant rabbits of the same size orientation as the one from my dream. There is more, but the detail is minor compared to the significance of the two main synchronous links.

Though this pales in comparison to nearly endless unexplainable “mystery girl” associations and numerous other mysteries (including my present knowledge of fractals in the language and certain types of patterns), I still find this one interesting, all in all, relative to the main reason I started paying attention to my dreams when very young and why I started dream journalism in the first place - because no adult could be honest or tell me how dreams continuously “echoed” into reality, often with precise visual detail of something not seen (or even existing) until later. There is no excuse for such ignorance or denial (or replacing personal experience with incompatible religious beliefs) - as each person has a will to make a life for himself - and to validate his own understanding successfully.

Morning of April 18, 1970. Saturday.



I am at school (West Elementary in Arcadia) and see my (second-best friend after Toby T at this time) friend Danny H. He is high on a scaffold and trying to be friendly with a giant boa constrictor when everyone else has gone into hiding within the school buildings. The snake’s mouth is ready to engulf him - the top of the mouth over him and the bottom part under the part of the scaffold he is standing on. However, nothing happens after this as if it suddenly becomes a “frozen image” from my perspective (as if time had suddenly stopped somehow). (In real life, some classmates made fun of him for being feminine, such as how he carried his books across his chest or how he spoke.) Note that with the term “boa constrictor” - the idea of constricting stomach pain or intestinal constriction are also possible plays (especially as a snake looks like an intestine). Thus the pain of a stomach illness could be a “boy constrictor”. I did not have this at the time - but Danny did in reality.

This dream seems to have two possible layers of composite cause as the dreaming mind cleverly utilizes over time. Because Danny was believed to be on the path to being “too feminine” (which was really no concern for me at all, but I did not like how he was bullied), the snake, being a boa (a play on “boy” as was often used in real life in my school, especially by David K, whereby if someone called him a “boy”, he would angrily state “I ain’t no boy/boa constrictor”!) seemed to grow to bigger-than-life as a sort of threat to see if this would be enough to increase his male nature.

Also, he had a stomach ache (as in real life) at the time and needed to go to the nurse’s station by way of a (fictional) questionable outside entrance that was clearly unsafe. This links to the snake also being a visual symbol of the intestine and the pain of a stomach problem. I was clearly, in both cases of interpretation, dreaming directly about him and not an aspect of myself (especially as I was not the one with a stomach ache in reality - he was).

Update Tuesday, 8 December 2015. There may be another viable “explanation” here. Snakes may also represent umbilical cords. In this case, I may be projecting Danny as being immature as well as not having as much support from other people (who are in the building while he is outside the building on a precarious structure). The “giant umbilical cord” may relate to being “constricted” as such (perhaps by his mother in comparison to my mother, as I view the scene from a distance).

This dream is type ECA (subtype Cbellsub: emergent consciousness bellicosity sublimated to a secondary character). The giant truculent boa constrictor is my emergent consciousness. Danny is the projection of my dream self, therefore the temporary waking self model, but my true dream self watches safely from a distance. Here my conscious self swallows Danny as representing coalescence.