A bizarre dream

A very odd occurrence from last night's beauty rest (and those of you who know me personally know that I'm the last person who can spare his beauty rest)...

You know how you get the same dreams over and over, and eventually you get to where you recognize it and realize, "Oh, I'm dreaming again," and you wake up? Well, one of my Old Reliables has me driving a car down a sleep slope in the mountains with a hairpin curve coming up, and I have to power-slide the car sideways to make the corner and keep from plunging down the mountainside into the brook at the bottom. So last night I find myself in the car roaring down the slope and I think, "Oh, here we go again," and I push the brake pedal -- but this time the brakes are out, and I go soaring over the edge of the road and racketing straight down the mountainside. I roll my eyes: "Well, this is a waste of time; I'm not going to get hurt 'cause I'm dreaming." The car slides into the brook and I'm instantly, like a cut in a movie, standing outside of it with Kinya and Merry. Merry looks a bit worried, so I tell her, "Don't worry, kiddo, I'm just dreaming."

"No, you're not."

"Yeah, I am."

She punches me in the stomach with a grin. It doesn't hurt. I ruffle her hair indulgently. "Toldja." Still not waking up, which is odd. There doesn't seem to be much to do down here in this canyon, now that I've gone off script, so I decide to open my eyes and wake up.

But I can't.

I try again. Still no luck; I'm hopelessly stuck in this dream-canyon. Now I'm starting to get annoyed. Kinya: "What's wrong?"

Me: "Can't wake up." I look at the car. "Can't very well go anywhere in the car, either." I look down the valley and there's a village.

Sudden cut, and I'm standing in the village. I try to wake up again. Can't. I decide that I need to get someplace where I can wake up, but I don't particularly want to walk. I look down the road and there's a pickup truck that somebody has left the keys in. I'll drive out of town and then maybe I can wake up. But I don't want to drive out of town the way it's facing; so I put it in gear and swing into a handy driveway so that I can turn around. I push the brake -- and the brakes don't work.

It's a long driveway; somebody has a double-wide that he's added a front deck to (this, by the way, is a perfectly realistic detail), and barbed-wire-fenced land that they're obviously running cattle on. I downshift to low, and then force it into park, and the nose of the truck stops about six inches from the barbed wire at the end of the driveway, well past the double-wide.

Very annoyed now, I look over my shoulder; I'll just have to back up very slowly. It'll be more complicated now that my pickup truck has acquired a fifteen-foot flatbed trailer. I put it into reverse, and the truck leaps backward; apparently reverse is much higher-geared than low is. Reflexively I push the brake, but of course nothing happens, and even though I spin the wheel right to try to swing the tail of the trailer back to the left away from the double-wide, the truck's moving too fast and I don't quite make it and the corner of the yellow-pine deck explodes in a shower of splinters. But at least the truck has stopped.

I shove it into park and stomp out of the truck in disgust. I'm really tired of this dream. The front door of the double-wide opens and a woman strides out, in more or less the mood one would expect. She is starting to open her mouth to give me what-for when I tell her disgustedly, "Don't bother; you're just in one of my dreams." She stares at me as though I were insane, her mouth still half-open. Kinya comes up to me from the truck, looking frightened somehow. "Papa, you're dreaming?"

"Yeah, sweetheart."

She is looking very woebegone. "So I'm not real?"

Tersely but not, at least intentionally, unkindly: "Oh, no, there's a real one of you. You're just not it." I turn and walk toward the barbed-wire fence; I want OUT OF THIS DREAM! I grab the two middle strands of the barbed wire and hold them apart; with the ease and fluidity of movement that I remember from my youth I bend over and slip between the wires. At least in this dream there is no back pain. But then on the other hand, in this dream none of the cars have brakes. I walk a few feet into the cow pasture. I take a deep breath and force my eyes open.

I can't see anything because it's dark, but I can feel the bed under my back and the sheet across my chest, and I can hear my bedroom fan. "I knew I was dreaming," I say with satisfaction -- and instantly I fall back asleep, straight into another dream. "That didn't take long," I observe, and then after that...oblivion (presumably because that next dream followed the script and completed satisfactorily).