When I was a wee lad, I semi-regularly had two types of bad dreams:
- Ferry disasters (possibly because I didn’t swim well and any rocking on a ferry kind of terrified me. Because I grew up on Vancouver Island, almost all of our holiday trips required taking the ferry.)
- Getting chased down by various things and entities, including but not restricted to:
- Vehicles of all types. They typically were missing the front bumper, because this made them more terrifying to me.
- Vampires
- Robots
- Mummies
- Assorted monsters
The chase dreams would usually end just as the thing was catching up to me, or in the case of a vehicle, just as I was about to be run down. I’d wake up, all frazzled, then eventually fall back asleep. Good times all around.
As an adult I very rarely have bad dreams and when I do, I typically wake up, think, “That was weird” and promptly doze off again.
Last night I dreamed I was either at the UBC campus or one that was subbing for it. It was vast and sprawling, and I must have been attending classes there, because I remember marvelling over how I was enjoying the science classes more than the arts, which was the opposite of my dream self (my awake self is the same, but not as strongly as the dream version of me). As I made my way across campus, it became time for me to leave. I was walking along one of those quiet campus roads that you see an occasional service vehicle trundling down, and as I approached the edge of the campus this road widened out into the start of a (I believe four-lane) highway. This was almost certainly my subconscious drawing in the Southwest Marine Drive entrance to UBC, which is indeed very highway-like.
Because this was where the highway started (or ended), it was very quiet. I needed to cross, and rather than going back to the quiet campus road, I opted to cross the highway.
You can see where this is heading.
I began to cross and almost at the same moment noticed a car approaching from the campus side, heading toward me. It was a low, dusty gold colour. It made me think of a 70s Dodge Charger. I looked it up and if this isn’t the car I saw in the dream, it is extremely close to it:
In the dream, I did a quick mental calculation and realized that the speed of the car meant I wouldn’t have time to get out of the way. Would the driver swerve around me? Plow into me? Was there even a driver at all? (The childhood versions of these dreams almost always featured driverless vehicles).
With no other options left, I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped straight into the air as the car approached. And it zipped harmlessly under me.
I woke up shortly after that.
Maybe the takeaway is that as an adult I have more control over things that frighten me, or make me uneasy. Or maybe my subconscious finally realized that three dimensions exist in dreams, too.
