Last week, my friend and fellow urban explorer ‘Slim Jim’ called me up, extremely excited by an amazing coincidence he’d just experienced. Like many of us who experience synchronicity, he felt compelled to share it, shout it from the rooftops – and he really wanted me to share it with the world on my blog or on the Action Squad website.
So here’s the story of how another ‘synchro-skeptic’ was blasted by a coincidence that seemed ‘more than mere’ ….
I am atheist, and I firmly and confidently do not believe in anything supernatural.
But I had a couple events happen to me six hours apart that were far too coincidental to be true, given the nature of the events.-
This past week (May ’09), some friends and I went down to Memphis to camp and play games in a large, amazing abandoned building.
The morning we were going to leave, I 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. Dreams often don’t make sense. There may not have been a reason. 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. Up until that day, I knew very little about snakes, and I basically assumed that most snakes were poisonous. The fact that the snakes were so close to me and I thought they could kill me with one bite scared me to the point that I sat up in bed and was jolted awake. They also were slithering so fast that I didn’t think I could outrun them, particularly when trying to run through the underbrush, which added to the scare.
I rarely have really scary dreams, and I can’t remember the last time that I was awakened by a bad dream. It almost never happens. And I’m sure this is the first time I’ve ever sat up in bed as I’m waking up from a bad dream. I was really scared. And snakes, of all things! Rationally, I never really consider wildlife a threat, because it’s very rare to hear of someone getting killed or seriously injured by a wild animal. And I’m no more interested in snakes nor scared of snakes than the average person. This is quite possibly the first time I’ve ever had a dream about snakes.
After realizing that I was sleeping in an abandoned building, in an urban area, a very unlikely place to see snakes, I shrugged off the dream, relaxed, and tried to get back to sleep. I wasn’t able to get back to sleep, which isn’t unusual – I have sleeping problems. Shortly thereafter, Mario and I got up and left town. Our plan was to instead visit a rural wooded area at the southern tip of Illinois which has many underground silica mines. I had explored some of them in years past, but recently found out where a couple more were that I was previously unaware of.
Our first goal was the Rhymer Mine. We first tried to access the mine from the road where the road intersects the valley that the mine is located on, called You-Be Hollow. There was, however, a no trespassing sign at the entrance to the valley, and since there was a house nearby and we didn’t want to get caught trespassing, we parked about half a mile down the road close to some state forest land signs, clearly state forest land. The region was about half state forest land, half private land, but there was no way of telling from the map which was which.
[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&ie=UTF8&ll=37.317547,-89.297132&spn=0.023891,0.038624&z=14&output=embed&w=450&h=350]
From the road, we hiked across a long field, which had so much poison ivy that it was impossible to walk without brushing against and stepping on poison ivy pretty much constantly … This area has the worst case of poison ivy that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve wandered through woods all over the country.
…
We followed the top of the ridge straight to the Rhymer Mine. Our trek was uneventful, except for the poison ivy that was everywhere we stepped. We found the mine right away – we found ourselves on top of a semicircular cliff with a row of mine entrances at the bottom of it. After a satisfying exploration of the mine, we set off on the mile-long trek through the woods back to the car.
Rhymer Mine entrance
A short distance farther, we were walking along at a brisk pace, trying to get back to the car as quickly as possible so we could catch up with the rest of the group as they arrived in the Chicago/Milwaukee area. I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was stepping.
Soon I heard a buzzing noise that sounded like an animal, but I neither knew nor cared what it was. I was too intent on moving quickly to want to figure it out.
I was moving so quickly that 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.
I think it’s been years since I’ve panicked this badly. 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 on 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 me. I yelled at him, “Shit! Shit! There’s an enormous snake right there! Run! Go! Go!! Go!!!”
I ran as fast as I could back the way we came. Mario looked at me bewildered. I continued to gesture at him to run away as quickly as he could, but he didn’t seem to care. Eventually, Mario followed me, but at a much slower pace. I assumed a snake could outrun me, so I took off within a second after spotting it, so that I had the longest head start I could get before it would decide to slither after me.
Keep in mind that I have never encountered a large snake in the wild before. I spent my childhood roaming the woods, and I regularly wander through the woods all over the country, mostly geocaching, sometimes hiking, and sometimes scouting underground mines. I knew there were snakes in the south, and yes we were at the southern tip of Illinois, which is relatively far south, but I thought you’d have to go down to Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama to see dangerous snakes. The woods we were in looked like any generic patch of hilly woods I’ve wandered through all over the Midwest. It looked like the woods I grew up wandering through in Iowa. I would never expect to see a large snake in generic Midwestern woods, and even after being startled awake by snakes in the vivid dream, if I had thought about it, I would’ve written it off as an irrational fear from a dream and I would’ve never imagined that I would encounter a large rattlesnake that same day.
And I’m fairly certain this is the largest snake I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve seen a few snakes at the zoo, but none of them were as large as this rattler. I had only seen snakes in the wild on a few occasions, and the longest was about three feet long and an inch in diameter, about the same size as the snakes in my dream. This makes it even harder to believe that I stumbled upon this giant only a few hours after waking up from a dream about snakes.
…
This hike back to the car was like an obstacle course, changing direction multiple times to avoid tractors, people, turkeys that we thought were people, lakes, and, most notably, snakes. I hike off-trail in the woods quite regularly, often sneaking around on private land, and I’ve never experienced anything this weird before.
My 29th birthday is today. I’m getting old. But this is the first time I’ve ever sat up in bed as I woke up from a bad dream, and I can’t remember the last time I woke up because of a bad dream. It’s very rare. I’ve also never seen a large snake in the wild before. 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 sitting up in my sleep 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.
I knew Max Action was interested in synchronicity and had had several surprising and unbelievable events happen to him. As we drove back, I called Max to tell him about my amazing incident and see if he might be willing to post it on the Action Squad site or on his blog. Believe it or not, at the moment I called, he was working on his synchronicity blog.
–Slim Jim
The next day, as I was explaining the details of Jim's story to my girlfriend Becky, she laughed and asked me if I'd seen Natalie Dee's 'comic of the day' (which she's a huge fan of)
I have no reason to doubt that the snake Jim saw was indeed massive – even though it would be larger than any timber rattler known, if his estimate of its size is even close to accurate – he’s a very sober engineer type, and if his first thought was that the snake was going to actually squeeze him to death, it HAD to be huge!
I wish I could remember my dreams … from Carl Jung to Slim Jim, people have amazing coincidences with their dreams – but since I never remember mine, any such synchronicities are doomed to be unnoticed and forgotten. Good thing I have plenty of waking ones, I guess!
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