Saturday, January 31, 2015

Dream: Driving Through Floods

Dream:  I was driving in the family car in Eugene.  I was driving down a street like Chambers street from 28th.  I was going to meet Mark at a movie theatre, probably at Gateway Mall, and rather than traverse a diagonal through downtown Eugene traffic, I was going to zip along Chambers until it met something like the Beltline and then zip along the Beltline until I hit the Mall.

It didn't work out that way.  I zipped along Chambers, which became more and more rural (almost like Greenhill Road).  The road became more narrow, and weeds and tall grasses began to sprout up on the shoulder.  I was driving through fields.  The day became more cloudy and rainy.  I zipped around a long curve in the road, and the road was flooded.

I started to drive through the water, but somehow turned back.   Then I decided to try to get to the underpass on the other side of the flood.  So I gunned the motor and drove as fast as I could through the deepening, surging, swirling water.  Brownish water frothed around the wheels and half-way up the doors.  I think in real life the engine would have been flooded or car would have gotten swept off the road.

I made it to the other side and parked the car.  The dream shifted, and I was waiting with a bunch of other folks for a bus.  There was a woman who was a bus representative who was taking customer's money and answering route questions.  The stop was under an underpass, and the roiling flood was near-by.

An older lady in a white convertible drove through the flood and parked her car next to the queue of folks waiting for the bus (to take them to the mall?)  The next thing I knew, I was in the white convertible with the lady, and she backed us into the torrent.  She tried to drive us forward, but we were swept back and into a kind of dark culvert with iron grates.  It almost was like being in a lock.  The bus lady was shouting instructions to us, and the car floated under the road and into a dock of sorts.

There was a break, and I was Tsunami Books.  This dream version was in a large Victorian house in a rural area.  Lots of wooden porch, wooden stairs, and segmented rooms.  I was letting people in or somehow in charge of a craft fair.  I was looking for an ink stamp to stamp people's hands and someone else was looking for a cash box...   There was something about waiting in line for a bathroom... but at one point I told Connie Newman "I dreamed the car got caught in a flood, and we floated into this dark culvert.  I need to write down the experience so I can use it in a story."

...And then the dream went on to other things, and all of us were on a flat-bed truck, and a youngish woman was in a speed boat on the river aside the road, yelling at us, "Have you seen [I'm gong to make up a name, Dexter, a large white horse]?  He was supposed to be in the paddock behind the house..."



It occurs to me that there were mostly women in this dream.

Driving a car through a flood is an anxiety motif I've dreamed since I was four.

I'm not sure why I would mash up being in charge of Tsunami Books (I lock the place up after Wordos meetings) and running a craft fair (Mark has run a holiday craft fair at his work for the last several years).  Oh, wait.... flood = Tsunami?

Crossing a river to an otherworld, frequently with a white horse, is another dream motif I have... although I'm reading "The Two Towers" to The Child and Shadowfax is carrying Gandalf between the Ents and  Helm's Deep.

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