I Dream of Driving

For as long as I can remember, even when I was young and had absolutely no experience behind the wheel of a car, I've had dreams about driving. As a child, I usually dreamt that there was a crisis that could only be handled by me, and only by driving somewhere. My brother would be hurt and I'd have to get him to the hospital right away, but of course I didn't know anything about driving, so it would be a harrowing, doomed journey. The pedals were always too far away, or there were too many of them, or I couldn't see out the window, or I didn't know where I was going and I'd keep driving by the same place over and over again, running out of time.

Once I got older and driving itself wasn't such a daunting task, the road became the problem. There's a section of mountain highway that exists only in my mind, but I know it as well as I know the road by the house where I grew up. The drive always starts out stressful, yet manageable: narrow, winding roads over which my car travels just fast enough to give me the sensation that I'm hanging on by a thread. But eventually I come around a curve and I see a river valley spread before me, and the road forks into even narrower halves and I follow one fork as I catapult out into the open over the hugest river I've ever seen, so wide that the other side isn't even in sight. The road is high over the water, and inconceivably narrow and curvy, so that it bears more resemblance to an unregulated roller coaster track than any highway that exists in reality, and no matter how badly I want to be able to slow down the car continues screaming forward until inevitably it blows through the barrier and out over the water. I feel equal parts terror, relief, and exhilaration, having reached the inevitable conclusion of my journey, careening weightlessly toward the surface of the river.

Recently, I've started having a new dream about driving. In the dream, I'm not particularly concerned about where I'm going, so I don't remember much about the road I'm on. The difficulty lies in the fact that I'm attempting to drive the car from the passenger seat. You can probably imagine how much it sucks, trying to wedge my foot over the middle console and blindly onto the necessary pedal, maneuvering the wheel from the side with my left arm. It's difficult to slow the car down and I keep over-steering, running from the yellow line on one side of the road to the curb on the other.

I'm not someone who believes that every dream is significant. Sometimes a dream about eating an ice cream cone just means it's July and you've watched too many Dairy Queen commercials. But when your subconscious insists on placing you in the same hypothetical situation night after night, you have to wonder if it's not trying to teach you a lesson. It's terrifying and frustrating and infuriating, finding myself in these situations that I can't seem to change or prevent, and yet being burdened with a single-minded desire to take control. Again and again I try to influence the path of speeding cars on perilous roads, and again and again I'm lost, I fail, I'm unable to really even see where I'm going because of all the effort required to wrench the car away from the course that it's on.

Maybe my subconscious wants me to know that it's time to get my insistent hands off of engines that are, for whatever reason, rigged to go 80 miles an hour right off the side of a bridge. Maybe it's time to accept the fact that there are some crises that I cannot single-handedly avert, and some cars that are determined to crash no matter how desperately I pull at the wheel. Maybe it's time I stop trying to drive, and just. rest.