Dream Snake

This story was sent in by a mechanical engineer, who calls himself Slim Jim. He’s a left-brain, scientific type, an atheist. In his free time, Slim Jim explores caves, underground mines and other hidden places. The abandoned building is where he and his buddies camped and the mine is what they explored.

Slim Jim and some friends drove to Memphis to go camping in a large abandoned building. The morning they were going to leave, Slim Jim had a vivid dream about snakes. “In the dream, I was sitting in the middle of the woods. I’m not sure why I was there. Right next to me was a pile of dead branches. After a while, several snakes came out of the underbrush without warning and slithered around me really fast. They were so close to me that they almost touched me. The snakes were about three feet long and an inch in diameter, not particularly large but not particularly small. The snakes were so close to me I thought they could kill me with one bite. Jolted awake, I sat up in bed.”

That same day, he and his friend, Mario, left Minneapolis/St. Paul, where they live. Their plan was to visit a rural wooded area at the southern tip of Illinois which has many underground silica mines. Slim Jim had explored some of them in years past, but recently found out where a couple more were located.

They were able to explore two of the mines in this area. On the way back to the car, through the woods, they moved at a brisk pace, trying to return to the car as quickly as possible so they could catch up with the rest of their friends in Memphis.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was stepping. Soon I heard a buzzing noise that sounded like an animal, but I was too intent on moving quickly to want to figure it out. I was moving so fast I didn’t notice the enormous rattlesnake coiled up in the middle of the ridge until I was no more than five feet from it! This guy was huge! It was curled up in a circle about two feet in diameter. It must have been at least ten feet long. The snake itself was about 5-6 inches in diameter. Colored yellow and greenish.

“I panicked. Instantly. My first thought was that it was so huge that it would squeeze me to death. My second thought was that I had no idea how poisonous this snake was, but being ignorant about snakes, I thought it was quite possible that its poison would kill me very quickly. And, knowing that rattlesnakes are dangerous, I assumed that it would have a strong desire to chase me down and bite or squeeze me to death.”

Mario was right behind him and Slim Jim kept yelling, “Snake, there’s an enormous snake right there, run, run!” Slim Jim raced back the way they had come, certain the snake could outrun him.

Until now, Slim Jim had never encountered a large snake in the wild before. He had spent his childhood roaming the woods and regularly wandered through woods all over the country, geocaching, hiking, scouting underground mines. The woods they were in “looked like any generic patch of hilly woods” in the Midwest, and he never expected to see a large snake in a generic Midwestern woods.

“The dream happening by itself would not be noteworthy. Seeing the huge snake in the wild was pretty shocking, and is a rare occurrence, but it does happen. But what are the odds of jolting awake from a dream about snakes and no more than six hours later finding myself five feet from a huge rattlesnake in real life? Unbelievable. Part of my brain refuses to believe it really happened. One remarkable occurrence of synchronicity isn’t quite enough to make me believe in the supernatural – I’m inclined to chalk it up to one crazy coincidence – but it does get me thinking about it. It would’ve made perfect sense if the dream had happened the night after I saw the rattlesnake, but the fact that it happened six hours before I saw the snake in real life is just too coincidental.”

He knew that his friend Max ( Magic Teapots ) was interested in synchronicity, so on the drive home, Slim Jim called him to related his experience. “At the moment I called, he was working on his synchronicity blog.”