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Let This Not Be An Omen
Jan. 1st, 2020 09:49 am I'm not a stay-up-until-midnight-on-NYE sort of gal. I experienced midnight vicariously while on the phone with my girlfriend in New York and then went to bed. Of course, I was woken up at midnight by the noisy celebrations of neighbors. Took me an hour and a half to get back to sleep. Slept for an hour and then struggled awake from a nightmare of a sort that I usually recognize as a nightmare and bring myself out of.
Nightmare journal: (This is the timeline chronology as pieced together, although it felt like the earlier parts of this were 'remembered' later in the dream rather than experienced directly.) I'm about to go on a short trip (only a couple of days) and as I'm preparing in my garage, a stranger approaches me with a problem. He need to store some things in a safe place for a few hours. I (evidently, based on later events) lend him one of my garage door openers so that he can put the stuff in there and then get it out later. When I return from my trip, my garage door is open and everything valuable is gone. Also gone is my car (although I was driving my car on the trip -- this is the point when I would usually click over into "this must be a dream" and wake up). There is a scruffy-looking mechanic in the process of putting away a bunch of tools at the side of my driveway. He allows as how he just finished helping some guy hot-wire a car at that address. He was pretty certain that the guy he helped was stealing the car, but hey, not his business to ask questions, right? I'm trying to explain all this to someone in authority but having trouble making sounds in that "trying to scream but nothing comes out" sort of way. I wake up.
Analysis: Yesterday's "review of the decade" post included reviewing some postings from 2010 about when my car was stolen out of my driveway at my Oakland house. This is very likely the seed of this nightmare. Also contributing was that my nose was a little congested and I was breathing through my mouth (with my CPAP thus blowing air around in my passages), which may have contributed to the image of communication difficulties.
Note: this next part is *not* a dream. It actually happened.
Took me a couple hours to get back to sleep. Woke up again around 6am because...regular wake-up time. Lying in bed trying to see if I can drop off again when there's a loud *crunch* from the street outside. Rip off the mask, get out of bed, put on my glasses, and go to the window. There's a car with a crunched-in front end sitting sideways across the near lane of the street and a young man standing next to it holding his head in his hands looking very distressed.
I pull open the window and shout to get his attention and ask if he's hurt, if he needs me to call an ambulance. No. So I throw on a bathrobe, grab my phone, and go out to investigate further. He self-reports that he nodded off at the wheel on his way to work. (He doesn't sound impaired in any way, just extremely shaken up.) I question him again about injuries in more detail. He doesn't know of any. He's dazed and saying he doesn't know what to do. (Also talks about "how am I going to tell my parents". Poor kid! He looked about 20 years old but I'm a horrible estimator of ages and he could easily have been older.) I tell him that I'm going to call the police and ask if there's anything in his car or on his person that would be a problem when the police come. I tell him that I want him to be safe. He says there's nothing. So I call and report a non-injury, non-emergency auto collision and verify the location.
Several neighbors have gathered (having also heard the initial crunch) including the owners of one of the cars he ran into. I run interference, letting people know what happened and that the police are on their way. When the police arrive, I introduce myself as the caller, introduce the driver (who is at that moment on the phone with his mother) and then step back and begin videoing the interactions between the police and the driver, just in case anything unfortunate goes down. (It doesn't, and I stop videoing when it's clear that the police are treating the driver with respect and sympathy.) Everything sorts itself out eventually. The driver's parents come pick him up. Cars are towed away. I check with the neighbors whose car was totaled to make sure they have alternative transportation for taking care of business in the mean time. They do.
No one hurt, though at least three families whose new year will be significantly disrupted by dealing with auto damage. One young man with unknown personal consequences but probably no legal ones. Me feeling like I've had another chance to practice the sort of social awareness and reflexes around authority structures that feels unfortunately necessary these days. (Did I mention that the driver was black and the police were white?) Please don't think I'm looking for cookies about that. I blog about details like this to communicate examples of everyday awareness and social caution. For me, the important thing is practicing that awareness: how could this go wrong for the most vulnerable person(s) involved? What can I do to mitigate that hazard? What are the social privileges I can bring to bear to help others? How can I do that without making my own unwarranted assumptions about people? (Was asking the driver about possible problematic items in the car a reasonable precaution or a prejudiced jumping to conclusions? I hope it was the former and that I would have gone through the same routine no matter who the driver was. But I'm interrogating myself over this and rehearsing whether I might have handled it differently.)
Anyway, that's how my new year has begun. How about yours?
Nightmare journal: (This is the timeline chronology as pieced together, although it felt like the earlier parts of this were 'remembered' later in the dream rather than experienced directly.) I'm about to go on a short trip (only a couple of days) and as I'm preparing in my garage, a stranger approaches me with a problem. He need to store some things in a safe place for a few hours. I (evidently, based on later events) lend him one of my garage door openers so that he can put the stuff in there and then get it out later. When I return from my trip, my garage door is open and everything valuable is gone. Also gone is my car (although I was driving my car on the trip -- this is the point when I would usually click over into "this must be a dream" and wake up). There is a scruffy-looking mechanic in the process of putting away a bunch of tools at the side of my driveway. He allows as how he just finished helping some guy hot-wire a car at that address. He was pretty certain that the guy he helped was stealing the car, but hey, not his business to ask questions, right? I'm trying to explain all this to someone in authority but having trouble making sounds in that "trying to scream but nothing comes out" sort of way. I wake up.
Analysis: Yesterday's "review of the decade" post included reviewing some postings from 2010 about when my car was stolen out of my driveway at my Oakland house. This is very likely the seed of this nightmare. Also contributing was that my nose was a little congested and I was breathing through my mouth (with my CPAP thus blowing air around in my passages), which may have contributed to the image of communication difficulties.
Note: this next part is *not* a dream. It actually happened.
Took me a couple hours to get back to sleep. Woke up again around 6am because...regular wake-up time. Lying in bed trying to see if I can drop off again when there's a loud *crunch* from the street outside. Rip off the mask, get out of bed, put on my glasses, and go to the window. There's a car with a crunched-in front end sitting sideways across the near lane of the street and a young man standing next to it holding his head in his hands looking very distressed.
I pull open the window and shout to get his attention and ask if he's hurt, if he needs me to call an ambulance. No. So I throw on a bathrobe, grab my phone, and go out to investigate further. He self-reports that he nodded off at the wheel on his way to work. (He doesn't sound impaired in any way, just extremely shaken up.) I question him again about injuries in more detail. He doesn't know of any. He's dazed and saying he doesn't know what to do. (Also talks about "how am I going to tell my parents". Poor kid! He looked about 20 years old but I'm a horrible estimator of ages and he could easily have been older.) I tell him that I'm going to call the police and ask if there's anything in his car or on his person that would be a problem when the police come. I tell him that I want him to be safe. He says there's nothing. So I call and report a non-injury, non-emergency auto collision and verify the location.
Several neighbors have gathered (having also heard the initial crunch) including the owners of one of the cars he ran into. I run interference, letting people know what happened and that the police are on their way. When the police arrive, I introduce myself as the caller, introduce the driver (who is at that moment on the phone with his mother) and then step back and begin videoing the interactions between the police and the driver, just in case anything unfortunate goes down. (It doesn't, and I stop videoing when it's clear that the police are treating the driver with respect and sympathy.) Everything sorts itself out eventually. The driver's parents come pick him up. Cars are towed away. I check with the neighbors whose car was totaled to make sure they have alternative transportation for taking care of business in the mean time. They do.
No one hurt, though at least three families whose new year will be significantly disrupted by dealing with auto damage. One young man with unknown personal consequences but probably no legal ones. Me feeling like I've had another chance to practice the sort of social awareness and reflexes around authority structures that feels unfortunately necessary these days. (Did I mention that the driver was black and the police were white?) Please don't think I'm looking for cookies about that. I blog about details like this to communicate examples of everyday awareness and social caution. For me, the important thing is practicing that awareness: how could this go wrong for the most vulnerable person(s) involved? What can I do to mitigate that hazard? What are the social privileges I can bring to bear to help others? How can I do that without making my own unwarranted assumptions about people? (Was asking the driver about possible problematic items in the car a reasonable precaution or a prejudiced jumping to conclusions? I hope it was the former and that I would have gone through the same routine no matter who the driver was. But I'm interrogating myself over this and rehearsing whether I might have handled it differently.)
Anyway, that's how my new year has begun. How about yours?
