Tag Archives: khaki

A Snake in My Pants

Cast of characters:

  • Amy P. – I met Amy my freshman year of college at the UW-Madison in 1996.  I lived with her for two years during college, and she’s been one of my best friends ever since.  She currently lives in Madison.  Miss her!
  • Random dude driving a brown VW Rabbit
  • Lil BUB – Celebrity cat… awesome!
  • Copperhead snake

Historical context:

  • I am absolutely petrified of snakes.
  • I love Lil BUB!
  • My dad drove a brown VW Rabbit when I was very little in the early 1980s.  I saw one driving down East Wash when I was in Madison last week… hadn’t seen one in a good 30 years.
  • I was in Spain in June.
  • I’m not particularly fond of khakis.

The dream:

This was surely an anxiety-ridden dream, verging on a nightmare.  I woke up in a panic.

I was walking through a small village in Spain with Amy.  We were walking over cobblestones, all the buildings were made of tan-colored stone, and it was a bright, sunny, blue-sky day.  While we were walking, a random guy drove up in an early 1980’s brown VW Rabbit.  He opened the passenger door and offered us a ride.  We seemed to know him and decided to go with him.  There were bench seats covered in white vinyl in both the front and back of the car.  It was a four-door, and Amy got into the back seat, while I got into the front passenger seat.  After closing the door, I looked down at my khaki shorts, and a copperhead snake slithered up from the right side of the seat, over my hip, and onto my lap.  I started screaming, but I couldn’t move to get it off of me.  He was angry and baring his fangs and kept lunging at my right thigh to bite me.  But he couldn’t bite me through my shorts.  I knew that, if my shorts were only an inch shorter, he would be sinking his fangs into my thigh each time.  Each time he lunged at my leg to bite me, he shot venom onto my bare knee.  I had a ton of venom running from my knee down my shin.  He just kept lunging and lunging while I was screaming… I’m not sure if Amy and the guy were even still in the car at that point.  All of a sudden, the snake stopped trying to bite me and slithered down my thigh, over my knee, down my shin, onto the floor, and through a hole under the dash and into the engine.  He was about 4-6 feet long.  Once he made his way entirely through the hole and into the engine, I felt some relief.

Suddenly, I was standing outside the car in the same village, but now in the town square, standing on wide tan-colored paving stones.  It was still bright and sunny, and I was still surrounded by tan, stone buildings.  I was now wearing khaki pants instead of shorts.  I looked down to my feet, and all of a sudden the snake started slithering out of my bottom, right pant leg and onto the ground.  The snake was in my pants!  I was so disgusted and freaked out.  I started screaming and jumping around trying to get him out of my pants.  He slowly slithered all the way out of my pants.  Once he was fully on the ground, he coiled up, and I knew that we was going to shortly lunge at me to kill me.  I looked all around me to see what I could do.  To my left, Amy and the guy were now standing outside the car watching me.  Behind me, I saw a church about 100 yards away.  I knew that, if I could get into the front door of the church, I could close the door and escape the snake.  I turned around and started to run full speed toward the church.  The snake immediately started slithering after me, gaining speed every second.  I ran for what seemed like forever, when I realized that Lil BUB was running behind me, also trying to escape the snake.  She was running as fast as her tiny legs could take her, but I was afraid the snake was going to get her.  I screamed, “Come on, BUB… BUB, come on!!!”  I kept trying to get her to run faster.  I finally made it into the church and started to close the huge wooden door behind me.  I peeked out and saw that BUB was only about 10 feet in front of the snake.  She finally ran in the door, and I slammed it shut behind her.  The snake lunged at the door to get us but slammed right into the closed church door instead.  BUB and I survived!

The end.

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Shoddy Swedish Dentistry

Cast of characters:

  • Sheri T. – A high school classmate and friend.  I haven’t seen her for at least 13 years, but she appears in my dreams more than anyone else!
  • A Swedish, male dentist.
  • A female bus driver.
  • Lazing Swedes.
  • A bunch of boy scouts.

Historical context:

  • Reoccurring dream!  Riding in a bus through a mountainous European landscape.  It’s almost always in Switzerland,  but in this dream, we were riding through Sweden.
  • Reoccurring dream!  Sheri T.
  • Reoccurring dream!  My teeth falling out of my mouth.
  • Don’t know that I’ve ever had three of my reoccurring dream themes show up in a single dream… crazy!
  • I have very healthy teeth!
  • In 1996, I was on a high school trip where we took a bus to New York City.  Only about an hour after leaving Waterloo, my younger friend, Adria, came to the back of the bus holding the fake half of her front tooth and asked me what to do.  She had recently broken her front tooth in half playing basketball, and the dentist had repaired it and given her a half-fake tooth.  She bit into some food on the bus, and the fake half of her tooth fell off.  She wasn’t in pain and ended up touring NYC with only half of a front tooth.
  • I generally think quite highly of Sweden and their health-care system and would have no hesitations about receiving dental care there.

The dream:

This dream jumped around a lot.  I was riding around in a yellow school bus throughout the Swedish countryside.  The terrain was mountainous.  I was sitting with Sheri in the green vinyl seats on the right side of the bus when I reached back into my mouth and pulled out my bottom left molar.  It had felt funny, and when I reached back to touch it, it just fell out.  When I looked at it in my palm, it was very small, like a front baby tooth.  But it was definitely my molar.  It was yellow with brown stains and was rotting.  I started to panic and told the bus driver that I needed to get to a dentist right away to get a fake tooth.  The bus driver told me that I was crazy to even consider getting dental work done in a third-world country like Sweden.  She told me that I should wait until we got back to the US.  I then had a flash in my mind of a 1970s-looking Swedish dentist office, with wood paneling on the walls, and a male dentist wearing a white smock and black rimmed glasses.  His hair was in a perfect 70s coif and was brown and graying.  He was sitting behind a dentist chair holding a pick and a drill in either hand, waiting for me to sit in the chair.  The scene frightened me, and I decided to wait to get my tooth fixed until I was back in the US.

Then I was back on the school bus, but this time sitting on the left side of the bus.  We came to a T in the road, stopped at the stop sign, and turned left.  Outside the window, I could see a bed sitting outside on the green grass.  The bed was covered in white sheets and was 100 yards long.  It was the longest outside bed in the world.  There were a lot of Swedes lounging around on the bed.  When we turned left, I could see the entire length of the bed.  It was so long!

All of a sudden, Shari and I were hiking on a dusty trail through the countryside with our classmates.  The path was made of dusty red dirt, and there were tall yellow grasses on either side of the path.  We walked along the path for a long time.  Eventually, we came upon a convergence of paths.  Another path merged into our path.  Sheri and I were at the back of the group, and suddenly a boy scout group merged into our path from the other path and cut us off from the rest of the group.  All the boy scouts were wearing khaki uniforms and beanies.  By the time Sheri and I were able to wade through all of the boy scouts to the front of the path, we could no longer find our group.  We saw a pine forest ahead and guessed that our group had gone into the pine forest.  We headed in that direction.

The end!