overthinking with nick.

by Nick DiCicco

I have never been one to remember my dreams. But now, thanks to a new medication, I can’t help but have vivid dreams every night. While most simply involve people I know in normal, everyday situations, they feel so real that sometimes I wake up and make sure I didn’t text any of the people in my dreams. However, for the past few nights, these dreams have not been normal – they are full of snakes.

I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I kept dreaming of snakes — over and over again. From hundreds of anacondas filling a gray concrete room to huge snakes in the jungle, they quickly became a recurring theme in my dreams.

Whether it be our teeth falling out, being naked in public, or freely falling, we have all had these common dreams, yet I have not heard much about people dreaming of snakes. Just like how all those dreams have supposed meanings, I figured that snakes must represent something too.

And they do.

According to an article from Business Insider, snake dreams are said to highlight ignored aspects of your life. The article then goes on to list 5 potential meanings of snake dreams and what different snakes mean.

1. There’s someone toxic in your life
2. You’re afraid of something
3. You have something new to learn
4. You’re life is changing
5. Your health is on your mind

• Anacondas: These may represent emotional or unconscious fears, like a fear of rejection. 
• Black snakes: These may point to a fear of the unknown. 

What was in my dreams? Black anacondas.

What are two things I fear most? Rejection and the unknown.

How could this not be the reason I was having these dreams? It seemed like the perfect explanation — the story I wanted to believe. But upon reading through the list again, I noticed something.

Anybody can relate to any of these fears and aspects of life whether they are having a snake dream or not. Now, I am not an expert in interpreting dreams, and I’m sure there might be actual explanations, but I can’t help but look at this the same way I view astrology – broad, but tailored to sound personal to everyone.

What if my dreams about snakes are simply just that – absurd dreams about snakes?

But how often do we ignore life at face value, instead applying some deeper meaning or existential explanation?

A few examples, all relating to girls, come to mind for me. First, after I got broken up with my first girlfriend, I was devastated, constantly trying to find a distraction, whether it was in the gym or watching movies. 500 Days of Summer, a movie about a guy dealing with a breakup, became my comfort movie as it offered me someone to relate to, so much so that I watched it twice in one day.

My gym has a room of treadmills where they play movies on one huge screen in the front, like a movie theater, and one day after the breakup, on what would have been our three-month anniversary, to my surprise, they were playing 500 Days of Summer in the theater. To me, this was not simply a coincidence, but instead was a sign from God that I would be able to move on and heal.

My second girlfriend also came with me attributing some cosmic signs that she was the one. We met about two years ago but stopped talking after about a month. Back in June, we reconnected, already making me think there has to be a reason we reconnected. Not only this, but her mom attended the same small high school of around 300 people that I attended. This had to mean something, right?

Maybe not. If I were to pay attention to all the weird small coincidences I share with girls in relation to them being my future wife, then I guess I’m going to have many wives when I’m older.

I am not alone in this tendency. On a more existential level, since the dawn of time, it seems that man has almost inherently wanted to find the purpose of life and explain why things are the way they are. This is clearly seen through mythology, religion, astrology, and philosophy. Like my snake dreams, we rarely accept absurdity at face value.

To resist that instinct, I’ve started following a new principle: seek truth. One that most people would say they live by, but few do. For me, this meant actually reading, researching, and diving into topics rather than just believing what I already think. This mostly included politics, but I realized in order to hold true to my principle I also needed to apply the same truth-seeking to my religious beliefs as well.

I’ve always been a Christian – and a fairly theologically educated one. I know the usual answers to questions (even if I have problems with them) about the Old Testament, prophecy, or interpretations of Hell and Revelation. I’ve spent years studying the Bible, yet rarely explored other worldviews beyond how to argue against them.

Recently, I decided to change that—not because I’ve lost my faith, but because my principle is to seek truth without bias. I’ve been reading philosophy, counterarguments to Christianity, and alternative perspectives.

Though I haven’t abandoned my faith—I still go to church and pray—the process feels strange. My worldview has been the same since childhood, and I have blindly accepted answers to questions, even if I disagree with them, so researching them more and accepting some of my doubts has caused a bit of guilt, which has not been eased by perhaps two of the most absurd situations I’ve experienced recently.

The other day at Chipotle, I was eating my bowl while watching a YouTube video—ironically about Christianity and atheism—when a random person walked in, came up to me, said that Jesus loves me, and then walked out.

Although the encounter was odd, I tried not to dwell on it. But today, as I was writing this article in the student center, another student approached my table. He asked my name, said he often saw me studying and working hard, told me that Jesus loves me, and then walked away.

Yea… scary.

The hypocrisy of writing a criticism of applying cosmic and existential meaning to absurd events in life, then instantly applying existential meaning to the fact that two random people told me that Jesus loves me in the span of two days, right as I started expanding my views of the world.

Absurd and inexplicable things happen in life daily. While there is harm in constantly applying meaning to everything, maybe even despite whether there really is meaning behind everything or not, our believed and maybe even fictional meaning behind things are capable of creating comfort and change.

Whether the snakes in my dreams are actual subconscious issues my brain is revealing to me, or just a strange result of medication, the outcome was still the same. I still researched it, and that research is what drew attention to potential fears I need to deal with.

The same could be said for my experience at my gym. Whether or not God actually planned that movie to be playing on that specific day or not does not change the fact that even me thinking that He did brought me comfort.

Trying to distinguish between absurdity and meaning is like flipping a coin with two heads. The conclusions, for the most part, remain the same. Maybe meaning isn’t something we necessarily discover, but something we create, even in the most absurd moments.