What does a dream about snails mean?

Of all the things that you could have nighttime visions about, snails, if I would guess, are probably going to be near the bottom of your list. It turns out, your dream about snails is actually quite deep despite appearances.

When it comes to more ‘memorable’ dreams, you probably will be dreaming about your home, people who have passed, or even floods or other types of disasters.

But when it comes to a person having a dream about snails, we’re going into the uncommon territory, to say the least.

What makes dreaming about snails difficult, as far as interpretation goes, is not the symbols that it contains.

Instead, people who have dreams about snails have a difficult time because they rarely remember their dream.

It’s too easy to overlook dreams about snails.

They’re very small, they’re easy to overlook and there are a lot of other things going on in your dream scenario.

But if the main focus of your dream is the snail themselves, you need to pay attention because it turns out that your dream about this mollusk, however seemingly insignificant it may appear to the eye, actually packs a lot of meaning as far as your day-to-day life goes.

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General meaning of dreams about snails

If you’ve been dreaming about snails and they are the main focus of your dream, this indicates your subconscious detecting some sort of paranoia or fear of other people.

I’m not talking about agoraphobia where you’re just afraid of meeting people in an open area.
I’m talking about fear of being betrayed, fear of feeling vulnerable, or fear that your inadequacies will somehow be publicly exposed.

You make all this an irrational fear, but the truth is everybody has their own specific type of fear.

We have different experiences and that’s why we experienced different traumas and we respond in a wide range of ways.

One of them is fear.

In fact, some people are so fearful that they can be clinically diagnosed as having some sort of phobia.

Nobody’s immune to this.

What’s important is that we become mindful of what it is that we’re afraid of and why we have this response instead of other types of responses.

When you dream of snails, your subconscious is using this symbol to indicate that you fear enemies that you cannot see.

You’re the type of person who can be okay with known opponents.

As long as they’re upfront and you know where they’re coming from, you feel you can take them on.

But the moment they try to hide behind you or disguise themselves as friends or even confidants, that’s when you get really paranoid and upset.

Because, as you probably already know, the people who are closest to you are the ones you will feel most vulnerable.

The betrayal stings extra hard when it comes from your best friend instead of somebody you just barely know at work.

Disappointments are especially crushing when they are dealt with by people you feel you have known all your life like your brother, sister, or parents.

Do you see how this works?

Your subconscious, by using snails, is trying to communicate with you that this coping mechanism might not be all that productive.

It may have worked in the past, given other circumstances, but today, it’s creating more problems than it solves.

What does it mean to dream of a giant snail?

Usually, snails are no bigger than your thumb.

They’re fairly easy to squash and most people don’t think much of them.

But from time to time, if you’re walking through a park or some forest area, you could see a giant snail.

In fact, in some places in the United States, there are snails that can get quite big.

When you see such an image in your dream, your subconscious is trying to let you know that a lot of your suspicions need to be analyzed.

You need to sit down and pick apart much of the unstated or unarticulated suspicious beliefs you have about certain people in your life.

This is easier said than done because a lot of people feel guilty.

If they realize that they really can’t quite trust their mothers, they feel guilty.

After all, that’s the woman who carried you inside her for nine months.

That’s the person who fed you, took care of you when you’re helpless.

How can you not trust her?

The same goes, to a lesser degree, with your father or a father figure in your life.

But these are precisely the kinds of things that you need to tackle and it’s very difficult, especially if you come from certain cultures where family is the most important value in society.

But what if you are right?

What if they do things that harm you?

What if at least one person in your family is so selfish that they don’t really care about the toxic fallout or consequences for the rest of the family?

You have to take care of yourself.

You have to practice self-love.

And one way to do this is to pick apart a lot of this underlying suspicion or misplaced ill feelings you have about certain people who are close to you.

For all you know, these may be misplaced.

Maybe you’re making mountains out of molehills.

Now is the best time to get to the bottom of it.

But if there is something that would support your suspicion, then you need to know now so you can come up with a better coping mechanism instead of hoping against hope that somehow someway, that person will change.

I’m telling you, that strategy is not a strategy at all because it never works.

First of all, how would they know there’s a problem when you basically have all these conflicted feelings when you’re around them but you can’t get the courage to tell them?

Also, when you have all these feelings and you really can’t quite figure them out, you hang on to them and they grow worse over time.

But since you haven’t taken the time to actually analyze them and pair them with actual facts that you could describe that really happened, you’re just holding all this negative and turbulent emotional energy in your hand.

And guess what? It’s burning you.

Do you see how this works?

Because the way you’ve been coping with this, so far, is harming everybody.

Sure, it’s a low-level kind of harm, but emotional damage eventually translates to bad health, toxic relationships, bad self-image, and low self-esteem, you name it.

Take the time to get to the bottom of these suspicious feelings.

Why do you have them?

About who exactly?

What did they do exactly?

Can you name a place and time?

Is there somebody you can talk to that actually saw this happen as well?

You run the risk of reading your present frustrations and issues to past events and blowing them out of proportion.

That’s what people do all the time and that’s why it’s so unfair to the people they suspect who are very close to them.

What does it mean to dream of a snail crawling on you?

If your mental camera focuses on the snail’s slow pace, crawling up your arm or on your skin, pay close attention to what else is happening.

Is it leaving a trail?

How are you responding when you see this happening?

Generally speaking, when you experience this type of dream and the focus is on the forward motion or the movement of the snail, your subconscious is trying to give you an analogy as to your coping strategy for past trauma.

You don’t have much of a strategy.

Instead, you’re looking at things that happened in the past or things that you imagined happened in the past as some sort of movie.

The last time I watched the movie, I know I didn’t have any role in the script.

I definitely didn’t have a hand in the acting.

All I could do was load Netflix, take a seat back, hang out with my son, whip out the popcorn, and hope against hope that the movie that he picked is worth watching.

That’s what movies are.

They are one-way conversations.

The best you can do is to pick the movie but everything else is up to the director, the producer, the actors, and a whole list of people responsible for the movie.

It really wouldn’t be a tragedy for us to approach our lives the same way.

Because if you look at your life as a slow-moving film playing out in front of you, involving actors that you didn’t pick, scenarios that you have no control over, and a script that you have no voice in, where does that leave you?

It’s as if you’re watching your life unfold and you are the moviegoer, there’s really no input from you.

Life is just this passive series of events, totally beyond your control involving people whose motivations you have no idea about except what you can see on the screen.

Do you see how powerless this leaves you?

Just as people often freeze up and feel powerless when they see a bug crawl on their skin, your dream image of a snail crawling on you, leaving a trail of slime, indicates your passivity.

You have all these low-level suspicions, some backed up by more facts than others, others completely speculative, it doesn’t really matter.

Because as these flow through your mind, all you can see is the screen.

Things are happening to me, she is doing this to me, he gave this to me, they took this from me.

What’s missing?

Take a guess.

When you look at all those statements which are summaries of the separate situations that took place in your life, you are missing.

There is no central actor.

Things happen to you instead of you, making things happen.

Because if you were completely honest, a lot of the things that happened to you, and I would say almost all of them except for natural disasters, are caused by some sort of decision that you made.

At the very least, they are exaggerated or exacerbated by the type of response that you had.

You always have a rule.

And the problem is when we convince ourselves that our lives are made up of this movie that we can just watch and be powerless over, we doom ourselves to a life of passivity and our resentment, lack of closure, conflicted feelings, and turbulent emotions and complicated memories of the past, become worse over time.

There is a sense of helplessness in this dream imagery but the good news is, it is not as hopeless as you think.

Because when you go back to the sentences above, you can quickly change them.
You can turn them from passive to active.

I did this, I allowed this, I permitted this.

What did they all have in common?

The word “I ” means you are still in control and although you can’t bring back the past because nobody has access to some sort of magical time machine, you can change how you respond.

You can change the personal narrative you have that explains your past into something more productive, something that will make you feel empowered, responsible, and responsive.

Do you see how this works?

Because the more you look at yourself as some sort of passive victim, the more you will be victimized.

That’s how that works.

What does it mean to dream about crashing snails?

When you dream of yourself squishing snails, either one by one or in whole bunches, this is an indication that you are finally finding the courage to analyze the certain things that you have always assumed to be true.

I had a friend who, for many years, was deathly afraid of women.

They only need to look in his way for him to just look straight at the top of his shoes.

I mean, I’m not talking about a guy who’s ugly, by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m not talking about some modern-day version of quasi-modal here.

The guy graduated from one of the top universities in the world, (not just in the United States but in the world) makes half a million dollars a year, dresses quite well, and is a great conversationalist because he has traveled to many different countries.

It is obvious, just by simply looking into his eyes, that the guy has an IQ north of 130.

High-value dude, all around.

But his personal kryptonite is women.

The moment they give him any kind of attention, he shrinks like a violin.

So one time, when we were drinking and I asked him, “Why do you always shut down when any woman pays attention to you intently?”

“Do you have that response to your mom?” I said half-jokingly.

He stared at his drink for a while and he told me a story.

Hacking back in junior high, (I met him in high school so this was before we made acquaintances) he was coming out of a locker and the male locker and the female locker were very close to each other.

In fact, some areas were facing each other.

And a lot of the cheerleading squad already left the locker area so they’re kind of loitering around in the long hallway section where both locker areas shared facing entrances.

There was a loud commotion when he came out.

All these hot females were just laughing, pointing their finger and laughing some more.

Other girls rushed out to see what the big deal was and they started laughing when they saw their hot friends laughing, and they were all pointing in the direction of my friend.

He said, “They were laughing at me. It was crazy. And I don’t quite know how to make sense of that but ever since that day, whenever I’m around women, I just clam up.”

That’s what my friend said.

And after a couple of years, I met him again during a get-together on the West Coast.

I was visiting from Southeast Asia so I’d moved overseas by that time.

And my friend, let’s call him Eric, had a completely different story this time.

Now, he is with a very good-looking and successful oncologist.

Heavy duty stuff, cancer doctor, very smart, and stunningly beautiful.

It was like a 180-degree turn for my friend Eric.

I was so happy for him.

I told him, “You’ve changed quite a bit.”

He said, “A lot has happened since we last talked. I caught up with another friend of mine. He was there with me during junior high that in that situation I shared with you a while back.”

What he told me really changed everything.

It turned out that his friend was making jokes.

He was miming all sorts of funny, goofy stuff.

And the girls were not looking at my friend and we were not pointing their fingers at him, but at the guy behind him, who was the class clown.

That one-chance conversation turned his life around.

Now, Eric is very confident, but not cocky.

He’s comfortable in his own skin.

He knows what he’s about and that’s what draws women to him.

And he obviously drew a high-quality female.

I share this with you because maybe there are memories that you can’t quite get away from which casts a long shadow on how you deal with people, how you look at yourself, as well as how you view your own personal level of competence.

Maybe you had a boss who told you, “You’re a loser, your work sucks. You are worthless,” or something to that effect.

Or maybe your father or mother said something.

Whatever the case may be, please understand that you are always in control of how you respond.

Because one simple missing piece of information might actually lead to a completely different answer.

It can lead to a completely different interpretation which impacts how you behave, how you think of yourself, and your confidence level.

So look for this.

Don’t take no for an answer.

At the very least, even if something really dramatizing happened to you just as you remember it, it’s not the end of the world.

You can choose to look at the victory that you have achieved.

You can focus on how far you’ve gone.

My own brother was severely abused by my aunt.

He only shared this with me a few years back.

But when he was around four years old, my aunt used to take him to a place called Baguio.

It’s a place in the northern Philippines that has a very nice climate during the hot summer months in the capital city.

My aunt used to take him there not for a vacation but to basically serve her friends.

So do you see this four-year-old little kid carrying plates, lugging around bags of rice, that kind of thing?

And he shared with me one particularly gripping story where he wanted to take a bath.

So my aunt said, “Go ahead.”

So there were these plastic containers where you just scoop water out of and you take a bath.

But my aunt said, “Don’t use the towel. Just let the sunshine dry you off.”

If this took place in a fairly warm area like Boracay or any of the other coastal areas in the Philippines, this could somehow make sense.

Because those places are hot enough that you can definitely dry off fairly quickly.

I mean, you’re not going to be completely dry because it’s also humid.

But Baguio is cold.

So my brother told me he was shivering the whole time waiting for the water to dry off his skin.

You know, he could have easily become a bitter person.

He could have easily had a warped view of women and authority.

I don’t know how he could have turned out.

I mean, at some point, I’m scared of the possibilities.

But he turned out well.

He’s an established nurse in California, he has a loving family, and his friends love him.

He’s an upstanding member of the local Catholic community in their parish.

He is pretty active in the church.

I asked him, “How did you choose to become better instead of becoming bitter.”

He told me that it all boils down to understanding that you can’t bring the past back and it also helps to try to understand the other person.

My aunt was going through a tough time in terms of her marriage at that time.

Her husband was cheating on her and living with another woman.

It was a whole mess.

Of course, none of that excuses what she did to my brother but the fact that he is willing to factor that in and see her as a total person just goes to the depth of his character.

And because of that, he’s able to forgive.

He didn’t forget, but he forgave.

And it shows in how he carries himself.

You can do the same.

I know, it’s easier said than done but what options do you have?

Are you going to hang on to the bitterness and the pain?

One of the Buddha’s most famous sayings is that hanging on to a grudge is like holding fire in your head.

The other person is not feeling it, you are.

The other person is not getting scarred, you are.

My brother, God bless him, was able to move on because he understood that if he hung on to such painful memories, not only will he be the one suffering, but those who love him will also be suffering.

Because a lot of people who suffer from intergenerational abuse, where their parents abused them so they abused their children and they abuse their partners aren’t able to forgive, aren’t able to move on.

I know, it sounds unfair because you took the hit, but you have to break the chain where you are because other people are relying on you like your kids, your friends, and people who love you.

What does it mean to dream of eating a snail?

Escargot is an amazing French delicacy.

I’ve had the distinct experience of trying some escargot and I’m still conflicted about it up to this very day.

On the one hand, it’s a new experience.

I’m an open-minded guy, I will pretty much try anything legal at least once.

But with that said, I was really pushing it when I had my experience with escargot.

I was really going on a limb there.

On the one hand, it felt like I was chewing on a piece of rubber.

On the other, there is some delicate texture after the initial rubbery sensation.

As far as taste goes, there was really not much there and it’s nothing to write home about.

But apparently, French connoisseurs are very big on escargot.

If you see yourself eating a snail in your dream, you can rest assured that this is not your subconscious trying to communicate to you an invitation to try escargot.

Instead, your subconscious is trying to let you know that you have the strength to take the hit.

In other words, you can swallow your pride and set things right by forgiving.

The story of my brother, which I shared in the section above, shows it takes strength to not be bitter but to be better.

It takes strength to break the chain of abuse, misunderstanding, false accusations, and miscommunication on your end because the secret to this is pride or lack thereof.

If you are willing to set aside your pride, you’d be surprised as to what you’re capable of forgiving.

But a lot of people have a tough time with pride because who wants to look weak?

You’re always thinking, “What if they do it again? What will they think of me? They thought they got me, they abuse me, they tricked me, and now here I am, forgiving them. I probably will look like a bigger fool.”

These, and many variations of it, are the things that you will have to grapple with when you are presented with an opportunity to break the chain of negative feelings and toxic memories.

Eating escargot is your dream symbol for eating your pride.

It’s not for me to tell you that this is the way to go, but focus on what you stand to gain.

Compare that with what you stand to hang on to or lose if you refuse to forgive.

Think about the big picture.

Don’t just think about how you feel today, but also think about 10 to 20 years from now, think about the family you will have, or think about the future of your children.

What is the meaning of dreaming of snails entering your home?

Your suspicion of certain people in your life has permeated your family relationships to the point that you need to do something about it.

It’s one thing to be uneasy about certain people in your family, it’s another to actually have these translate into the things that you say or do on a day-to-day basis.

People are beginning to notice.

Pretty soon, it will be decision time.

Are you going to communicate with that person?

Are you going to set up some sort of controlled environment so you can hash things out?

Are you going to first give yourself the space and the time to do an emotional audit, what exactly are you feeling, where are you coming from, and is this real?

These are some of the many questions that you need to be asking regarding long-standing suspicions so you can finally get a handle on them.

What does it mean to salt snails in your dream?

One of the worst things that could happen to a snail is when a sadistic person sprinkled salt on them.

Their bodies start to produce a lot of secretions and it seems like they’re going to basically melt away because of so many secretions coming out.

The snail has permeable skin.

When it comes to contact with salt, it draws out water.

If you want to dehydrate a snail quickly, pour salt on it.

But be prepared for the moral consequences because when you do that, it causes a tremendous amount of pain.

When you see this in your dream imagery, you’re going through emotional catharsis and you may not be aware of it.

Maybe you’ve been frustrated lately.

Maybe you have been engaging in some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior like you’re buying succulents or buying small stuff off Amazon or Shopee.

At first, you didn’t think much of it, but by this point, when you look at the credit card bill at the end of the month, maybe the thought crosses your mind, “Why do I keep buying all this stuff?”

Look for some sort of obsessive behavior and try to figure out what emotional state or what issue that is trying to compensate.

Trace it to the origin, leave no stone unturned, so to speak.

You’d be surprised as to where it all heads.

Because at the end of the day, it’s really all about communication.

You have to have somebody that you could talk to, somebody who wouldn’t judge you, somebody who would give you their full presence so you can fully get stuff off your chest.

And then and only then can you start compiling a journal and possibly talking to somebody who could get you professional help to walk you through these issues.

And then finally talk to the person who cost you your trauma and then repair your relationship.

Otherwise, if you insist on just keeping things submerged, don’t be surprised if you eventually run into an iceberg just like the Titanic.

Because you can only submerge strong emotions for so long.

They can manifest themselves in your daily waking consciousness as a sense of ease, but the moment you feel that is the moment you should be curious enough to start investigating yourself because that’s not normal.

Do you see how this works?

I wish you the best.