Dream Journal: Road Trip to Seattle

[hrj]

This may be the first dream to stick with me where I as clearly living in Concord. I'm starting on a road trip from the Bay Area to Seattle, in a little (and I mean LITTLE) sedan, accompanied by cryptocosm and two other men who seemed to be co-workers of mine. Cryptocosm had been driving (??to get to my place??) and it was just after dinner so I said I'd take the next shift. (And I know how small the car was because the guy sitting behind me had to push the seat forward enough that I had to sit sort of sideways to drive.) It was clear exactly where we were, but the gps showed the merge of 680 with 80, so I figured I was starting from Concord and that I'd figure out how to get on the freeway ok.

The next scene in the dream -- and this was definitely a "next thing I knew" not movie jump-cut -- we were parked on a stranger's driveway and had a flat on the left rear, and it was almost dawn.

Now you have to understand that in dreams I have a real "thing" about driving while asleep. I do it regularly and it scares the crap out of me. So in this one, I insisted that I hadn't been driving asleep, I must have gotten short-term memory loss from the trauma of getting the flat. (There was some indication that the car might have gone out of control and sideswiped some other vehicles, although the parking job seems to have been under control.)

But when I went to get out my phone to call roadside assistance. The case was there but my phone wasn't in it. Instead, in the same pocket, was a stranger's high-tech pager. There were a number of clues in the pager to the owner's identity (like information on his employer, since it was for his job), so I set about trying to decipher who he was and how he was involved. There was some sort of recording or broadcast coming out of the device (which was actually my radio-alarm) that I was having trouble hearing. And somewhere in there the owner of the driveway came out and I had to reassure her about what we were doing there. And round about then I figured I needed to wake up and get moving.

Interpretations and image sources: I was just talking recently about needing to plan another Seattle road trip. As noted, sleep-driving is a regular anxiety of mine in dreams, but I'm not sure if it means anything other than a real-world concern for falling asleep at the wheel. No clear resonances for the other elements, although I note that with 4 people in the car, somehow I was the one who had to organize everything. No waiting for other people to rescue me! And then there's the motif of getting distracted from an immediate problem by an abstract puzzle that needs solving.