Lost, in traffic

Last night’s dream (this morning’s, actually) was one that I have, with some variation, rather frequently.

In my dream…

I was trying to drive a former female friend of mine back to her home from some daytime event we’d attended together. Unfortunately, I was lost.

The streets down which I was traveling kept changing from those that I almost recognized as belonging in one city or town I used to live in to those of another. And landmarks kept cropping up that were clearly out of place.

My passenger was less concerned than I about the strange drive we were on. She kept pointing out places she thought she recognized and laughing at the weirdness of it all. And she frequently wanted to stop and explore some of the more interesting things we were seeing.

Me: I just wanted to know where the heck we were and how to get where we wanted to go. And the volume of traffic was so heavy that I was unable to pull off and ask directions or look for a map.

Lost, so lost.

Last night’s dream came awfully close to being a nightmare. It was another of the nasty, UPS-themed dreams that have been haunting me for years.

In my dream…

…I was a UPS driver trying to return to work after an extended absence. While I was gone, the DIADs (those little computer=clipboards the drivers use to collect signatures, to input data, etc.) had changed radically from the one I learned to use. I was expected to pick up the new model and immediately use it with the same level of efficiency as all the other drivers. But I’d received no training with the new model and I wasn’t going to be given any training.

When I asked for some instruction I was just pointed to a stack of packages and told, “Scan them, load them into a package car, and get the hell out of here and deliver them!”

In terms of knowing how to what I was told to do, I could not have been more lost.

Last night’s three

In terms of both sleeping and dreaming, last night was upside-down for me. Usually my sleep is segmented with a longer, dreamless segment followed an hour or two later by a much shorter, but more dream-filled one. Last night’s first sleep was short, but contained two very detailed dreams, and the second sleep was much longer, and also included a detailed dream.

the first dream: In this dream I was an office worker (I’ve never been an office worker in real life) in a large, cubicled space. I seemed to know all of my fellow employees really well, though none of them reminded me of anyone I’ve ever known in the waking world.

Office politics and office romance were the main themes here. No one seemed to hold any antipathy toward anyone else. Practical jokes, laughter, and “messing around” in a storage closet were the main elements.

the second dream: The setting for this second dream was on a passenger train. Or, more precisely, it was outside of a train as those of us passengers were being transferred from one train to another. This transfer wasn’t being done at a normal train station, but out in the country where two sets of tracks seemed to parallel each other.

Strangely, even though it was a completely separate dream from the night’s first, many of the characters who were my fellow employees in that earlier dream, were fellow passengers with me in this one. And we knew each other in friendly ways.

My main concern in this dream was lost luggage. I almost always travel with two bags, and that was the case here. But in the transfer from one train to another, while all our luggage was laid out on the ground between the two trains, I’d somehow lost one of my bags.

I was almost ready to ask some of my friends to help me look for it when I woke from the dream.

the third dream: This was another UPS-themed dream. It found me making some very late, special deliveries to key personnel in a large, downtown bank that also happened to be a covert, heavily armored government facility of some kind. I was racing from office to office, from floor to floor, trying to get all the packages delivered before the building was locked down for the night. I’d just made my final delivery and was literally running for the door as the security officer stood there, keys in hand, holding it open for me.

Who WAS that woman?!

Last night’s sleep was properly segmented, and the first such I’ve had in weeks. Some folks get all their nightly (or daily) sleep in one solid chunk. Sometimes I do, too. But usually my sleep is divided into two distinct parts: the first one being five or six hours long; and the second, coming sometime later in the day, is generally two or three hours long. And it’s this second sleep that usually contains my dreams. That was the case this morning.

In my dream…

…there was a higher degree of lucidity than is normally the case for me. This awareness that I was dreaming while I was in the dream manifested itself a number of times and finally allowed me to wake calmly from what would otherwise have been a rather disturbing situaton.

The setting of this dream was here in San Antonio. As a matter of fact, it began down in the residential foyer of the hotel in which I live.

As the door to the elevator opened, I found myself eye to eye with an attractive, smiling woman whom I apparently knew in the dream world, but whom I cannot place among the various women I know or have known in real life. I could see her very clearly, and heard the sound of her voice as we talked. I’m guessing that she may have been a composite of different individuals I know or have known. If I was an artist, (which I’m not, by the way), I could very easily draw a sketch of her.

She was headed out of the hotel as I was headed up to my apartment, but we decided to spend a little time together. We took a stroll down by the river, then rode the bus to a part of town where she was headed. At a number of times when we were walking and on the bus, things seemed more than a little strange, as they often do in dreams. When the strangeness would distract me from our conversation, I’d apologize to her, saying, “Oh, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not usually this disoriented, but I’m dreaming.”

And she’d laugh lightly each time, telling me not to worry about it, that she understood completely. Then she’d put her hand on my arm or her arm in mine and I’d laugh, too. All would be well, then: happy and well.

When the bus finally dropped us off she used a pay phone at the bus stop to make a quick call. I looked around and realized that I didn’t know where we were at all. Looking back at where the pay phone had been I saw that it was gone, and so was the woman with whom I’d been spending time. The bus had pulled away. There I was standing in a strange place. But I realized that since I was dreaming, all I’d have to do is wake up and I’d know exactly where I was.

And that’s exactly what I did.