I woke up from a series of stunningly unpleasant nightmares this morning. I don't often have nightmares, actually. Not sure what it's about.
First, I dreamed I was waiting for a train to Trenton. I'm not sure why I needed to go to Trenton, although it's not purely random: there was that year I lived with Michelle in Yardley, across the river from Trenton, and it was a year full of frustrations, as it was the summer I took my master's exams, which, despite my passing, were not what I had hoped for. I couldn't figure out where I was, exactly, either. The place I was in could have easily been somewhere in Korea.
Anyway, I was not near the platform and the train was pulling in. I ran to catch the train, but I realized I had dropped an important list. The list was written on a long piece of tissue, like from a roll of toilet paper. Wind blew it under the train, and I couldn't bring myself to board the train without the list. The train pulled away, and waiting on the other side of the tracks was a woman in a grey Oldsmobile – like Michelle's old, generic-looking (85?) Oldsmobile. The woman scolded me for missing the train. I realized the list was still blowing away in the wind, and I had no chance of catching it.
Then I was having a different dream. Things were not clear at all – more a gestalt of images than any kind of comprehensible plot line. I was in the mountains of Guatemala, trying to drive one of those recycled 60's-era school-buses they use for public transit there. True to form, there was a Virgin Mary on the dashboard and blinking Christmas lights around the front windows. But my passengers were a group of my students from the hagwon, and one of them was on some kind of Quest. You know, the sort of thing that involves dragons and swords of power or stuff like that.
But we'd managed to misplace some of the other students, and we were looking for them. And there was something in flames, and the road was bad and had donkeys in it, and women with bundles of coffee or something stumbled around in the periphery. And then I lost control of the bus and jumped away, only to watch it carom to the bottom of a hillside and knock over a tree. And my students were all standing around me, crying.
And then I was having a different dream. I was trying to find someone's house, driving my old 1965 VW Bug around something that was like a cross between Los Angeles and Seoul. And I came to this really bad neighborhood. Maybe more like Mexico City at this point. And I drove down this dead-end street that was very steep, downhill. And I parked my Bug at the bottom, and got out to knock on the door of this house, but it was the wrong place. And then I went to get into my Bug, but I remembered that the starter was broken (Which was common with that car), and that I would have to roll-start it. But the problem was that I'd parked almost at the bottom of the hill, and it was a dead-end.
I decided to try to kind of roll it crossways at the end of the street, but as I started pushing it, it dawned on me that there was no barrier at the end of the street, just this gaping deep chasm. And suddenly I realized I was going to roll my car right into the chasm. And the brake wasn't working. And stupidly, rather than just jump away, I thought of trying to get in front of the car to stop it. And so the car pushed me right off the cliff, and I fell into the chasm with my car above and behind me, and I crashed at the bottom and was crushed by my VW, and I woke up breathing very fast and scared.
