The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of

Yesterday, when my alarm clock went off just before 5:00 a.m., I found myself wanting just a few more minutes of sleep before I got out of bed.  Okay, I said to myself, you can have two more minutes.  Any longer and I knew I’d fall back to sleep and wind up being late for work.  

In what seemed like just moments, I was at the bottom of the driveway that leads to the garage where I work.  For those of you who don’t already know, I drive a school bus and the driveway I’m talking about is so narrow that only one bus can enter or exit at a time.
 
When I started working there back in September, I was told the driveway was going to be widened, but not until next year.  So when I arrived yesterday, I was surprised to see that the driveway was blocked and that two crews were already removing the trees that lined it.

Surprised or not, I parked my car in the lot that had not been there before the holidays and started walking up the hill. I waved to the first crew, who waved back and kept walking. I waved to the second crew, but they didn't see me. I kept walking until I suddenly realized all of the dirt the second crew had removed from the earth was headed in my direction.  I screamed and tried to outrun it, but instead, I tripped and fell to my knees. The dirt continued to descend, coming over my head like a tidal wave. I knew I was about to be buried alive when I woke up.

Awake, I got out of bed, but I was shaking from head to toe. The dream had been so vivid, so real that I felt I was about to suffocate.  Out of bed now, I turned on the television to distract myself and started getting ready for work until I stopped suddenly in my tracks, realizing what the dream meant. I had not, as I thought, been falling under the dirt, but had been falling back to sleep. I had been so afraid of being late for work that my subconscious mind had concocted that entire dream sequence in order to frighten me into wakefulness.

Wow, I thought, what an amazing mechanism the mind is. And then my next thought was: How come my mind is not that amazing and creative when I'm awake?  How come when I'm awake it just travels around in circles like a broken record, playing the same old thoughts again and again inside my head?

But wait.  Maybe knowing what the dream meant is, if not creative, at least insightful.  Except that right now I don’t know if knowing what the dream meant means anything at all.  Opps!  There goes that monkey mind of mine again going around in circles like a broken record, record, record.
My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE