lucid dreams

I had a new dream last night, or rather this morning. When I say new, I mean I don’t recall ever having this dream or even a similar dream before.

I often remembers my dreams, especially the lucid ones. Not every dream, ever, but I remember a lot of them. All the way back to when I was a kid. And while I’m dreaming, I recognize the setting or the situation and immediately become aware I’m in a dream.

This time, everything felt unfamiliar, even after waking.

Anxiety dreams are the worst, and among my most frequent, at least of the ones I remember. Usually they focus on me being either lost or trapped. Whether it’s in a house (there are at least three distinct houses that occur in my dreams, although sometimes they morph into each other), a school or campus, or at work.

These places I dream about, I think of them as rooms in my mind, and each has its own background and reason for being.

So this new dream, this definitely fell into the “trapped” side of dreams.

I was outside of a house, a really nice house, with a circular driveway, green lawns, flowering plants along the edge. I was putting a child into the back seat of a car, and then I got into the car to drive somewhere. A woman, not necessarily my sister, but a person who was like a sister in my dream, was waving goodbye to me, and then the car started to back up. The woman’s face turned into one of horror and she started running toward me yelling, “You can’t drive the car!” It wasn’t a command or a warning, but a realization.

She was right, I could not drive the car. It kept backing up in an arc, as cars do when the front wheels are turned, and there was a cliff behind me. I tried controlling the car but there was no way to physically drive it. The steering wheel controlled nothing, there were no gas or brake pedals. I tried opening the doors so I could get out, but there were no handles to grab onto.

At this point, I realized I was dreaming. So, knowing this, my first conscious action was to change the child to something else. I turned my head to look at the back seat and there was just a bag of groceries. So far, so good. I was going to then figure out how to get the doors to open, but as I was looking back, the car hit some rocks at the edge of this cliff, tumbled over them, and slid down, down …

And I awoke. Not in a sweat or a fright, because I recognized it was a dream. I woke up thinking, “Huh. That’s new.”

I used to keep a dream journal long, long ago. Decades ago. It’s part of why I still remember some of those earlier dreams. Writing this dream down in case the situation recurs—most likely not exactly this same dream, but anything similar. Especially since I’m very curious about this new house and this woman. Next time, if I recognize the dream in time, I’ll try to find out more about them.

For the music connection, this post brought to you by Twenty One Pilots – Routines in the Night.