The Dream

Several weeks ago, I had a very vivid dream.  When I awoke from it, about 4:30 in the morning, I recorded what I remembered of it, which was quite a lot. Here are my recollections.

The Dream
I was riding as a passenger in a car driven by someone who is a friend, someone who lives quite a distance from me.  It was the first time I had been a passenger in his car; his erratic driving surprised me.  We were on a two-lane highway  adjacent to what looked like a seawall to our left.  I couldn’t see a body of water, only sheets of water spilling from the seawall, driven by high wind onto the highway.  It was raining, hard, but the wipers either were not working or he had not turned them on.

As we drove down the highway, he frequently became distracted as he talked, failing to notice the car drift far to the left into the lane of oncoming traffic.  I don’t recall what he was talking about; I was paying attention to his driving.  On several occasions, I said “watch out!” as he crossed into the other lane just as oncoming headlights became visible.

At some point, the seawall on the left disappeared, replaced by what I thought was a wide strip of sand, with commercial buildings, like retail and restaurants, near the water.

Just as the car rounded a curve, I saw the “sand” on the other side of the highway, and just as quickly my friend swerved sharply across the other lane and into gravel, not sand.  At the same time he swerved into the gravel, I saw a car heading in the opposite direction leave the roadway; I yelled “watch out!” again, just as we narrowly missed the car and one immediately behind it, a police car with its red and blue lights flashing.

My memory of what happened next in the dream is incomplete and fuzzy.  Somehow, the scene shifted so that we were on the same gravel beach, but on a road at an entrance onto the highway, near the retail/restaurant area.  My friend’s driving demeanor had changed; he was very, very cautious.  There was plenty of space between us and cars going in both directions, so he could have gotten onto the highway several times, but he seemed to want more space.  The driver of a car behind us started honking, first two short bursts of noise, then sitting on the horn so it made one long, loud, maddening, blaring noise. That prompted my friend to enter the highway, crossing the oncoming lane and into the lane in which we had been traveling.

The irate driver was right behind us, sitting on the horn.  My friend was slow to reach minimal highway speed and did not want to go any faster; the driver behind us was close on our tail.  We could hear the driver and his passenger, a woman, screaming at us, cursing us. The car was inches from my friend’s car; I began screaming back at the drivers, which only escalated the interchange.

I asked my friend if he had a gun; he didn’t answer; instead, he reached in front of me into the glove compartment and drew out a pistol, still in its holster, and started waving it in front of the rear-view mirror.  As he began waving the pistol, I saw a change in my friend’s face that transformed the dream from realistic to surreal. His face became bright red and shiny, like an apple, and his cheeks puffed out, contorting his face into a caricature of itself. White steam started spewing from his ears.  What I saw frightened me, but I smiled and said to him, “Zen,” bringing my hands together, palm side down in front of me, my fingers pointing away from my body, then pivoting my wrists so the fingers of each hand fanned out in opposite directions.  Suddenly, his appearance changed back to normal and he seemed calm.  The car following us backed away, then turned off the highway, the woman in the passenger seat still screaming and giving us the finger as the car turned away.  And there, the dream ends.