Click image to enlarge
Beware the land of dreams, where Mr. Toad takes control of your brain! |
To say that I have an interest in toads would be an understatement. A more accurate assessment would be to say that I’m obsessed with toads. In fact, just recently I was at a restaurant in the drive-through lane, and while clearly thinking of feeding my own toads later that night, accidentally ordered a breaded cricket sandwich by mistake. How embarrassing!
Frequent thoughts of toads throughout the day have blended into vivid dreams about toads during the night. This is certainly not a new phenomenon, and spans back decades into my childhood. They happen so often that I even bought a couple of dream books to help me analyze what their reoccurring nature might mean. Every source that I have consulted says that toads are either bad omens or that some kind of treachery is at hand. Aside from their overly gloomy interpretations, I choose to take them for their more literal meaning – I just have toads on the brain!
I have these toad dreams at least once a week, and sometimes a lot more often than that. The types and sizes of the toads vary from dream to dream, and range from tiny toadlets to massive, Beelzebufo-sized monstrosities that I could only dream of (literally!) in real life. My favorite dream toad is the American toad, although cane toads and others often hop through my nightly visions. The recurrent theme is of me being outside somewhere and encountering anywhere from a few toads up to hundreds of them, and then trying to grab them all and carry them home. I usually don’t have any kind of container to put them into, so I always have my hands full of them, stuffing toads into my pockets and gathering them up in my shirt.
Throughout these toad-grabbing frenzies, I never think about what I will do with hundreds of toads, once captured, where I will keep them, or even how I could possibly feed all of them. My goal is always simply this: No Toad Left Behind. This is often the point where I wake up and realize that it was all just a dream. Sometimes, however, reality is still a bit fuzzy, and I find myself in bed looking for remaining toads under the covers, in my pockets if I have any, under my pillow, or even up my sleeves. So far to date, I have been sadly disappointed at the outcome. Maybe one of these days, my dreams will come true!
-The Toad Talker
Back to Blogs>>
