in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

If you're ready for another excrement-themed dream, read on! (You can guess the corollary to that, I'm sure.)

The dream started with a work trip with a nameless, faceless coworker and a real-life coworker who, although nice, has bossy tendencies. We were in a small car, trying to go somewhere to do some sort of site-based work (I have no idea why I was along). It started raining harder and harder, and at some point we had to ford a rushing creek with the small car, which I now noticed was either completely topless or just open on all sides like a Jeep. The bossier coworker was issuing directives about how to go about crossing the stream ("gun it" being the main idea). She said something about bracing myself, but I wasn't entirely braced, and I certainly wasn't ready for the head-to-toe spattering with muddy water.

We made it across okay, except for being completely wet and muddy, and stopped at a ramshackle house where we were going to stay. There were some other assorted people there, although I'm not sure who they were or what they were doing. The overall atmosphere was sort of scientific field outing (or rather, what I would imagine that atmosphere to be like)*.

The place was pretty makeshift, with a toilet out in the middle of the room. No one seemed to find this odd or unsettling, and consequently I didn't either. I sat down and did my business**, and that's when everything started to go off the rails.

For some reason when I stood up, the *ahem* excrement ended up in two [rather large!] piles on the seat (?? it was definitely in the toilet before). That disturbed me quite a lot, but I was even more disturbed to see a little worm-like creature wriggling about in it***. And then, as if that weren't disturbing enough, the real freak-out began: on closer inspection, the "worm" turned out to be a snake! Wriggling around in the excrement, mind you. The body was about the size of one of those small green snakes, but it was oddly segmented. The head was disproportionately large****, at least 2 inches across, with large, very creepy roundish yellow eyes. It was bobbing its head about like a cobra (no hood, at least), looking at me in the most alarming way. I can hardly emphasize enough how very alarming and disturbing it was.

I had started making alarmed noises on seeing the mounds of excrement on the seat, and they had escalated by now to full-blown, terrorized screams (although I couldn't properly get out half of them, so they were half raspy whispered screams). A kid that I had "dated" in 6th grade (?!?) was sitting near the toilet and hadn't reacted at all until this point. He suddenly had had enough, though, and told me to pull myself together and stop the screaming and freaking out. I pointed out to him that he might be freaked out too if confronted with the fact that such a vile creature had just passed through "one of the most sensitive holes in [his] body" (?! sigh.).

That's all I can remember, but it's still disturbing me.



*An interesting detail was that the makeup of the group was eerily multicultural, although disproportionately male.
**Odd variation on the theme of having to go to the bathroom in public--ordinarily in those dreams that's a major source of distress (although, oddly, I don't really have those dreams).
***The real-life inspiration for this undoubtedly being a real-life colony of fruit flies in the compost I just emptied yesterday.
****Which, with my limited herpetological knowledge, I took to mean it was a viper.

in which my subconscious's superego punishes my subconscious's id

The other night I dreamed that my husband had branched out at work into managing not just landscaping stuff but computer/software/marketing things. It wasn't clear how he had gotten this particular project, but it seemed like he had maybe taken it over from another manager who wasn't getting things done. He was excited about having such a big project; it was something for a huge, important company, and although I didn't really get what it was, it was something fundamental like managing orders or something. That's the boring part, though. The funny part was that he introduced me to the guy who was going to be his assistant in charge of all the computer aspects: it was Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, no less. He was grinning affably and seemed about as happy about the job as my husband was.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty about my glee that the spouse had an attractive sidekick, but the next part of the dream was extremely unpleasant. We lived in an old fixer-upper house in the country (although not our real-life house). I was rooting around in a cluttered room trying to find something when I saw a flash of color. It turned out to be a black-white-yellow-and-red reptile. At first I thought it was a coral snake and went through the little ditty in my head ["red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow"] and was alarmed to see that the red stripe was right next to the yellow stripe. Then I noticed that it had legs and thus couldn't be a snake. I was still thoroughly freaked out, though, assuming that it was some kind of equally poisonous "coral lizard". I jumped up on a chair like the stereotypical woman-confronted-with-a-mouse and tried to figure out what to do. There were three big dictionaries within reach, so I figured I could try crushing it with those. I hurled the first one at it, but it landed an inch or so away from the offending beast, prompting it to scuttle away.

Knowing that the "coral lizard" was hidden somewhere in all the junk was even more alarming, and I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to find it and kill it so one of our dogs didn't stumble on it and die (not to mention the humans). Then I looked around (still standing on the chair) and noticed that there were all kinds of big, dangerous-looking scorpions* and other insects on the walls. The whole thing was rather creepy, especially with the added layer of guilt at lusting** after my husband's coworker.

*The scorpions on the walls of my house do have some basis in reality.
**Yet another illustration of how embarrassingly G-rated my dreams tend to be: said "lusting" was really just the idea that he was cute and it would be kind of fun to make small talk with him.