I dreamed an eerie, very coherent dream. Real plot. Real characterization. A story.
In the dream, I was driving in my pickup truck along an unpaved (or very poorly paved) stretch of highway. A very desolate place. There were two of me. Not like two sides of myself; not like a doppelganger or something; just two of me. Side by side, one driving, the other staring out the window. Traveling companions.
It was near sunset, and bitterly cold. The landscape was not mountainous, but not flat. The vegetation was Patagonian. Really, the stretch of road was like that long, mostly straight rise from Osorno to the Argentine border in Chilean Patagonia. Like… driving up to Bariloche, on the Argentine side, with the volcano Igi Llaima (err, I think it's Igi Llaima) hovering like some undiscovered, exotic Fuji above the distant lake, below and behind.
It was starting to snow. And although the landscape seemed like Chile, the roadsigns were in Korean. Of course.
It was getting dark, and I was worried about something. One of me was worried. The other just shrugged, and muttered, do what you want. So we stopped. We pulled up a steep stretch of side-road, up against a fence under some gnarled, twisty, Japanese-painting pine trees. Darkness fell. We climbed into the back of my pickup, to sleep.
We awoke to the sounds of traffic. I looked out and it was morning. There was at least a foot of freshly fallen snow, but it was heavy, wet snow, like heaven throwing snowballs at Earth. Still falling. On the road below, there was a traffic jam. All the cars had Korean plates, but I saw a group of Chilean carabineros monitoring the situation from the comfort of their idling car, a ways up the road.
Several vehicles had pulled off the highway behind us, up the steep drive to stop near us under the trees. One truck, driven by a smoking team of Korean blue-collar types, was trying to negotiate around a pile of snow that appeared to have a car buried inside it. And suddenly, the truck began to skid sideways down the steep drive. It plunged into the traffic below, with almost no sound — in the weird, puttering silence that comes in blizzards. Squoolurshshsh…
There was a weird yelping sound. I saw that a dog lay in the road near the bottom. Like a golden retriever puppy. I popped the back of my camper top on my pickup truck and ran down the slippery road to pick up the dog. It was dead — struck by the out of control truck.
The other me came down beside me, looking on impassive. I was horribly upset, but I didn't say anything.
And then I said (the other "I" said): "You'll need to get to level ground, if you want to restart your dog." Like… giving advice to someone who's trying push-start an old car. It made strange sense, but it was still utterly useless advice.
I woke up.