2019 October 12 — the nightmare I just had

I haven't been sleeping well.  This past night, I think I was awake almost every hour, seemingly on the hour.  I decided to make myself stay in bed and try to sleep, and not to get up at five a.m.

All it got me was a nightmare.

I am driving in the green bug.  The top is down.  It is nighttime, or sometimes daytime but dark as if a cloudy day (I can't really remember if I actually saw clouds).  Sometimes people are with me; they're friends, though I couldn't tell you their names or who they were.  I am driving around because I am sad, because I've lost her.  Sometimes I am on narrow, small town streets like you might find in Boone, NC, or parts of Gastonia, NC.  Sometimes I am on more open streets driving between large houses, under trees.  Sometimes I am in the country.  There are one or two places I stop—some kind of chintzy yet charming house by itself at the corner of two country roads that seems like a comfortable home decorated in bright primary colors on the inside but bills itself as some kind of place for fishermen on the outside, and then there's a kind of an old warehouse or barnlike structure that's been converted into a shopping mall that I actually drive the car into.

There are people in the dream, sometimes.  I remember there's a narrow road between buildings where people have parked a truck and are milling around it and I have to drive around or through.  It looks like they might be loading or unloading the truck, but some of the people also appear to be posing for engagement photos, and yes, as I write this all down a second time (I wrote much of this once just now in a letter that may not ever be delivered) I realize all the significance that this would hold for someone looking for symbols and psychology.  There are also, occasionally, the people in the car with me, though usually the car is empty.  There are also people pulling into the brightly-colored home/fisherman's center when I am leaving the dirt parking lot.

I remember that for part of this dream I am driving with no seat belt, and I realize I should put it on before I get pulled over.  This happens when I am in the middle of nowhere.

It is a desolate dream of being nowhere, going nowhere, having nowhere to go.  Directionlessness literalized in the figurative way dreams pull that trick.  I hardly ever remember my dreams, you know.  Usually I sleep too heavily to remember them.

For all of its nothinghappening—no, because of all of its nothinghappening—this is one of the worst dreams I've ever remembered having.  There aren't words for what I felt driving around nowhere to noplace in the dream, and that oppressive despair was the central thing, even more than the empty space.

I woke up and rather than risk having another dream like that one, I came downstairs and wrote a love letter.  And since that may never get read, I went online and I wrote this.

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