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.

What the Hell?

Last night I dreamt that I was asked by my former 3rd grade teacher to come perform a comedy routine for her current students, so I anxiously wrote down a few notes on some things I thought 9-year-olds would find funny. But then when I got there, there weren't any 3rd graders, it was just everyone I hated in high school, all grown up.

Huh.

(I'll fill you in on Houston soon, don't worry.)

Plus, No One Will Arrest Me For Stalking My Own Boyfriend

This morning I had several dreams in a row about wooing Gregory House, MD. In one of them, I tried to cook him dinner. In another one, I was trying to diagnose / cure some kind of disease he had. My favorite was the third one, though, where we just drove around in a car and I took a more subtle approach. You know, just talking to him about his life and trying to convince him that every other woman he's been with didn't deserve him.

(Hint: if a woman starts telling you about how everyone you've ever dated was a bitch, she's probably trying to get in your pants. Or, she just genuinely thinks you date bitches. In order to tell which it is, you should try making out with her. If she enjoys it, it was the former. If she's shocked, sorry about that.)

Now I can't stop thinking about House. I know he's not real and I'm crazy and all that, but WHATEVER. I should probably feel guilty about dreaming about House instead of Lee, but I can't control what my subconscious does. Plus, I'm 99% positive that Lee will one day be a slightly grizzled, misanthropic, middle-aged genius. So IN YOUR FACE, HATERS. I'm pretty much already dating House.

Stay Tuned For My Special Guest Appearance

I can't believe I'm actually confessing this in a public forum, but the other night I had a dream about a man. A man that is not my significant other.

Specifically: Gregory House, M.D.

In this dream, I was part of House's diagnostic team, and he and I had a tender moment, where he was being uncharacteristically kind and thoughtful and sensitive. And then we made out. The next day, doing differential diagnoses, I was really afraid someone was going to find out, and mock our relationship, since I'm so much younger than him. And then he had to be rushed to the hospital because he passed some kind of vicious-looking tape worm. Then Wilson came to talk to me about how I had made out with House (because Wilson knows everything). And he was so nice and kind about the whole thing that I got to thinking that maybe I ought to make out with him, too. But then I decided against it, because I didn't want to give everybody at Princeton-Plainsboro the wrong idea about what kind of girl I am.

After this stuff happened, though, everything took a turn for the worse when we all realized that the weird tape worm that House had in his intestines was actually an EVIL MINDCONTROL TAPEWORM from another planet, and that a whole low-income apartment complex downtown was infected with them, and something had to be done! So after that everyone go real busy, and there was a lot less making out going on.

The best part about the whole thing, I think, was partway through the dream when I realized that I had never seen myself on the show, so none of the viewers would know that I was actually part of House's staff. I was outraged as I wondered, why had all my scenes been cut??