The driving dream...

I had the first of what promises to be a long line of panic dreams last night. I say the first, and I really mean, the first night that I caught myself having this dream but somewhere deep down knowing that I have had it before and I will have it again. I don't know if I dare interpret this dream, but I do insist that it feels bad to think that things are finally running smoothly on their recently greases axes, or rails are blades only to result in fallacy... that is what I think about this very moment.

I am already being a bad partner even though it is my deepest desire to be a good one. I wish I knew how. I feel like I have been more attentive, but it doesn't seem to be so, and when I try to slip away, to be myself for a few minutes, I am invariably villainous for not wanting to be there "together". Too much together makes one want to be apart, and too much apart either makes one want to be together or convinces one that apart is ultimately better...

Meanwhile the cloud that has, quite literally, settled over Santa Barbara and ripped open, dumping its molecular contents since last Sunday continues to slosh its uninvited dampness in sonorous, splattering cascades, and I am reminded of last night's dream. I was driving. But the dream began with an argument, I wasn't supposed to be driving, I didn't want to be driving... I wanted my own car, one that wasn't a stick-shift... We had been looking for a reasonably priced one (this is both reality and the antecedent in my dream). It was dark and the argument was more of a silent-film argument, there was no talking, just a passive-agressive walking to the passenger's side instead of the driver's side. I don't think that the baby was there. It was just the two of us, silently, angrily seething. I didn't want to drive, but for some reason, I had to. There was no escape... The rain poured down, the asphalt was slick, the streetlamps were reflected in blue rivers on the pavement before me. We were going on a trip, I don't know where, but it was a long trip and we were going to be on the highway. There was none of the normal panic that I feel with the manual which is caused by stalling on thouroughfares in highly populated, densely trafficked areas... No I was on the highway, and I was shifting gear... pushing the clutch down with all my might, short legs making the leverage difficult... 2nd and then third and then he was urging me to switch, I could hear the grinding, I switched but all the while I was swerving, or straying between lanes, I somehow couldn't keep myself in the straight line that should have been so easy to do. I shifted into fourth gear, and instead of the jerky bucking that I expected I slid even more quickly, as if I were rolling down a San Francisco hill in a bad eighties movie or in Scooby Doo and the brakes had been severed, but I was really on a flat, but curvy highway. I was slipping from lane to lane and the car was accelerating disproportionately to the amount of pressure being put on the gas pedal. I had forgotten to keep my foot near the clutch, and I had mysteriously forgotten how to use the steering wheel correctly, we just kept swerving back and forth, oncoming headlights, and lane-changing cars missing us by mere millimeters... And then I awoke. That was it.

I used to have different recurring dreams, rarely panic ones, but over the last several years one really bizarre recurring paninc dream was that I was late to calculus class and that oh my god... I hadn't gone all semester and I had been missing it for weeks and weeks and what was I going to do... That is more of a classic panic dream (and of course it has been years since I had to do anything calculus related but is always seemed plausible in the moment)... And as a little girl I had this recurring nightmare about being trapped in a gutted old sleezy buick or being chased by greasy kidnappers that drove said Buick up my driveway and trapped me and held me prisoner in my own home, that, or they held me hostage in an IBM-type supply closet, an office that was somehow abandoned by its cubicled inhabitants. These are more interpretable, and are still apparent in me - a fear of being trapped, a fear of failing to meet the rigors of my job (responsibilities)... I suppose that maybe this last one is a fear of freedom itself? A fear of removing shackles and striking out on my own?

I also used to have a florid, rich fantasy life... one that until recently had been supressed but has now returned with virulent vengeance only to leave me confused and dissatisfied as opposed to the way I felt when I was six and every night I would go to bed creating the very same dream scenario in my head... it was a saga in which I, six-year-old, first grade girl was (no logic here, but hey) in charge of a room full of delinquent fifth-grade boys at a juvenile detention center. I don't recall any specifically sexual fantasies, but that must have been at least an amorphous aspect of the dream... I mean I had crushes on all of the boys that made cameos in the dream... but there was never any physical manifestation, just the satisfaction of having a set of keys to dangle before their eyes, and a group of adoring (yes, they were, I was something of a tinkerbell in the dream, and we played all kinds of games) boys that I could tell what to do, and force them to obey me... Early manifestations of a dominatrix personality? Perhaps, but my upbringing was straight enough to repress those tendencies, I think.

I didn't like last night's dream. I don't want to have it again, but I fear that I will. I wonder if there is a root problem that I need to address, and then of course, I know there is, but I don't want to hear it or believe it or deal with it.... I am cold now, and I need to get ready for bed. I need to read a story to the girl and I need to turn on the heat. I will go, after writing far too much blather today. I really shouldn't subject other people to this, but then, I am not forcing anyone else to read either. I am vaguely annoyed by my lack of internet savvy, and wish that I could link things and that this would show up when I search for it, but then I am kind of glad it doesn't because then I would feel a little more naked than I already do (even if I am, at heart, a nudist)... Alas. The world continues to spin, and tragedies occur over which I have no control and no possible impact, and instead of focusing on others I continue to focus on myself... There really is something wrong with that.