I just had a dream. One of those that seem so real, that when you wake up and realize it really was just a dream, you are out of breath with happiness, because the dream was so upsetting. This dream didn’t just seem realistic, but as I began to think about what had happened in the dream, I began to read into it. A lot. I have always hated symbolism. I always say that I think dreams are a lot of random firings of the neurons within the brain. But I can’t help but bring Freud into this and psychoanalyze my dream. It’s just too easy to do so. So easy that I feel like there had to have been actual meaning in the dream.

I was possibly at my grandparents’ house. At least, I was in their town, so I am assuming I was at their house. I was there with my family – my younger siblings and my parents. It was raining out, and raining very hard. The skies were grey and green and the wind was blowing the rain into sheets. My parents told me to drive home without them. I don’t know why they wanted me to drive home, and I didn’t really want to drive home, but they asked me to, so I agreed.

The next thing I know, I’m in our mini-van, driving home. I’m in the driver’s seat, and in the middle row (of the 3 row mini-van) there are two young children. I don’t know who these children are. They aren’t my siblings, at least not my siblings now since my brothers and sister are not “young children”.

I pull onto the highway. It is still raining very hard, storming I guess. I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I just continue with it, pulling onto the highway. As I pull onto the highway, I feel like I can’t really see what’s going on. The lights are on, but it still looks very dark. I check to make sure the lights are on, and they are. I check again. The lights are still on. I keep checking as I speed up to merge onto the right lane. I need to get out of the lane I am in, because it’s going to end. But I feel vary short, and I can’t really see behind me, or in front of me. And everything looks so dark. I’m moving as if I am in a dream (because I am), but I don’t worry about that. I just keep merging or shifting lanes, or whatever the term is for getting out of the right lane that is ending, into the new right lane.

I think I do that successfully. In this dream, I don’t know how I made it, but am relived. But then, I don’t stop shifting there. I keep drifting to the left, into the middle lane. I don’t really check behind me as I switch lanes. I try to check, since I know that I am switching lanes whether I want to or not. I don’t see anything, but I still feel very little and kind of lost within the huge driver’s seat. Then I hear screeching and shouting and I feel metal against metal. The two metals together make a loud, long, sound that I feel inside of me, as if my bones were rubbing against themselves instead of the metals of two cars.

I think of just driving away, because I could. Whatever happened, my car still drives. But I decide against that. I am scared, and all the sudden I’m in the back row of the mini-van. And there is nothing weird about this. At this consciousness, one can drive from the back row – there is a steering wheel, and gas and break pedals, and the place to insert the key. I remove the key from this new driver’s seat in the back of the car. The two young children are still sitting in the middle row – now they are in front of me. They don’t say anything or do anything.

I look out the window, and see some car part lying on the ground in the middle of the highway. It is a long tube that flares out at the end. I don’t know what it’s for, but it appears to have fallen off of someone’s car.

A woman gets into the first row driver’s seat in my car. I don’t question it. I sit back in my seat and take a deep breath. I look straight ahead. I look to the side. I look back. The woman is slowly driving the car in reverse. I wonder where she got keys to drive the car, but don’t care where she did. I can see that she is driving the car backwards to exit the highway. A couple hundred feet back there is a turnoff. It’s not a normal highway exit, but a regular street. There is green grass on this street. As I sit there in the back row, just breathing and taking in what’s going on around me, I realize that the woman driving my car looks a lot like one of the nurses from my school’s health center. She looks like that nurse who I am convinced hates me, and who I am not too fond of myself. And yet, I am letting her drive me slowly backward toward the calm green street.

And then I wake up. I am so relieved that it was just a dream. So relieved.