I’m driving a little car. I’m not familiar with the car, its instruments are odd, my seat is too far back from the pedals. Not only that, the morning is frigid and the road I am traveling on is icy and I’m not in any neighborhood I’ve ever been before. I am trying to reach the pedals and shaking, a headache is coming on as my neck tightens and my jaws clamp in tension. I can feel the slide coming and slowly begin to glide off the road, in slow motion, frantically turning the wheel in the direction I’ve been taught, into the slide, into the slide, but nothing works and I end up in the ditch. That’s when I wake up.
Nightmares are rare for me. I have recurring unpleasant dreams, dreams that are not happy, fun, uplifting, but they aren’t terrifying. Instead they tend to be mildly disturbing, causing me to wonder what is going on inside my head, what has caused me to create a troubling scenario that I’ve never encountered this intensely in reality; what did I eat at dinner that got into my guts and made so much turmoil that I had to have this mid-night angst? The dreams are easy to interpret. If Freud or Jung were at my bedside they might insist I go deeper, to find more hidden meaning, but the meaning I have found for them seems to suit my slothful psyche.
The dreams, starting decades ago, were about cars and me. The car would be different in each dream, and the dreams were months apart sometimes, but the theme was the same. I am driving a car. The car is on a road. The road is icy. Or the road is muddy or bumpy. Or the road is full of holes. Or the road is steep. Only occasionally was the road easy to navigate, a joy to drive on, with lovely scenery outside my window. No, the road was horrid, the weather similarly awful, the conditions unhappy. I was struggling to keep the car on the road, or pushing on the gas to get it through the deep mud, or pushing harder on the gas pedal to get it up the vertical hill. The car wouldn’t cooperate, would slide off the road, would stall on the incline and move backwards. The end result was not positive. I was exhausted, afraid, without solutions.
After several of these same types of dreams, different only in the conditions of the road or perhaps the state of the car, I began to see that the car, the driver (me) and the road symbolized the problems I was struggling with in my life—an icy road was the precariousness of a marriage on the brink of disaster, slogging through mud a metaphor for trying to get to a solution about money issues, the hill the difficult climb up out of trouble. There was never anybody in that car except me. I was the one in charge of trying to keep the car on the road, trying to find the address, attempting to conquer the hill. Eventually, after a series of these uncomfortable dreams, there would come one in which the car worked magnificently, the road was dry and clear, the hills were gentle. It was clear that the problems I had were being solved; I was feeling serene again.
Then my husband and I went on a cruise to Mexico, just a short four-day cruise. We had a wonderful time, we both loved the freedom of leaving our luggage in a room and not having to move it in order to see a new town, we relished the gourmet meals, the level of service made us feel like royalty. We took cruise number two a couple of years later and that’s when my car dreams changed into cruise dreams, even though the second cruise was as lovely as the first.
In my dreams I was on a cruise, sometimes with my husband, sometimes with people from work, occasionally with people I’d never seen before. I wasn’t driving (or piloting) the ship, of course. I didn’t have that kind of control. I was a passenger who had to do something and I had to do it quickly. Most of the time it was packing. If you’ve been on a cruise you know that you have to pack your bags the night before and leave them outside your cabin door, where they are collected and taken off the boat as soon as it docks. The people who belong to the bags don’t get to disembark until several hours later.
Lots of my dreams involved me getting the bags packed on time and out to the hallway. In those dreams I was behind the 8-ball, late, scrambling, the boat was about to leave on another cruise, I was supposed to get off. I couldn’t find all my clothes, the suitcase wouldn’t open or it wouldn’t close. Anxiety!!! Other cruise dreams involved not being able to find my room in the labyrinth of the ship (a real possibility if you have a bad sense of direction). I wandered up and down the ship, from one level to another, confident people around me , laughing, eating, talking about their excursions, having a lovely time, knowing how to get back to their rooms—those dreams reminded me of the ones I used to have about not being able to find a classroom in high school, not having the Social Studies book, and realizing a test that would determine the quarter grade was in a half hour.
A couple of days ago I told my mother about these dreams. She thought changing to dreams about cruises meant I had “moved up in the world”. While this is a nice idea, I see them more as meaning that the events bothering me now are more out of my control, like a huge boat—I’m not the captain. That is in line with my “aging mom” responsibilities. I have much less control over what happens—life is the captain of this ship and it will go where it wants to go. In these dreams I never get to have the delicious meals, or the afternoon tea, or get to tour a new town. I am packing, trying to get organized, be on time, or I am searching for my room—and maybe in that room there will be safety, at the very least I will know where I am.
I don’t mind having dreams like this—it shows me what is on my mind that I might not be looking at—they aren’t so disjointed and strange that I could never interpret them without the help of a professional. There probably are more profound meanings to be found, but the ones I’ve found serve me well. I can zero in on real-life problems. If they are showing up in my dreams then they need to be addressed with more energy than I am giving them. If I’m in denial about something, my dreams will not let me look away. Pay attention! A cruise ship is bearing down on you! A car is sliding off the road! You are lost!
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