Car Crash Dreams
In the first that I remember, I wasn’t driving, but rather playing basketball. Just the same, the dream occurred shortly after I started learning, when I was hyper-paranoid about causing an accident, at a time when I was playing a lot of basketball, too, and these pieces of my life intertwined in my subconscious. In the dream, I shot recklessly in some driveway that looked like it could easily be in my neighborhood, but that did not explicitly match any I knew in real life. The ball caromed off the backboard with enough force to smash against the hood of a parked car. The owner came out of his house and didn’t look happy. I assured him I would pay for it. My next shot ricocheted and fired over a fence. As if I now existed in a cartoon or Muppet movie, the same car emerged, having been hit again as a result of my errant basketball skills, this time hit so hard it was flipped upside down, and yet still somehow rolled into view, this time with the owner in the driver’s seat glaring at me as I mumbled that I would pay for that, too, suddenly conscious that I in no way had the money to cover a repair of this stature.
These dreams have come and gone, but three hit in close succession capping a cross-country road trip as summer turned to fall 2016, after my fiancee and I had driven the final stretch of days from Arkansas to Tennessee into various North Carolina. In the first, a bright blue car fishtailed in front of me and I was too close to do anything but crash, and woke upon the moment of impact. In the next, I was asleep not only in real life but in dream, and trying to will myself awake as my eyelids drooped, as one stayed shut, as I pressed the brake, certain of an impending accident, willing myself that I needed to wake up, vaguely conscious of Heather sitting shotgun, sympathizing with how tired I looked, only to, at last, succeed in waking, and find myself in bed.
Then the third, the longest.
I was driving down a stretch of highway, Heather by my side again, when we spied two small airplanes ahead, flying at strange, sweeping angles, within inches of the road and then looping upward again. Then the cars ahead of us lifting from the ground and coming back down, hard, though they drove on. This didn’t register as impossible--because in dream, what you see is your reality--but rather a grave injustice. That it was the pilots of those planes causing a disruption in gravity and wantonly wreaking havoc on the road below, and I was grateful that we were far enough back to go unaffected.
Until we were.
For our car took flight. First a couple feet, then soaring higher, until I opined that this was definitely not a safe lift off for a car, as if there were a standard, safe distance off the ground for a car in a situation like this, and I waited for us to crash, expecting for us to smash back onto earth, tires exploding off, irreparable damage to the undercarriage, not to mention our spines condensing in our seats.
And I woke.
I did some cursory research on the meaning of car accident dreams as I wrote this post. I read that such dreams might represent going too fast in life, pushing oneself too hard and needing to hit the brakes. I read that it might suggest an avoidance of conflict in real life, such that your subconscious is forcing the issue, causing a collision.
I’m not sure what of that is true, or what applies to my situation, or if it’s all more simply categorized under those periods when I was driving more than usual and my mind made a link. In dreams, I’ve always struggled with reading, I suspect because my mind can’t synthesize text as fast as I would read it, and maybe something similar is true of driving--of imagining the road ahead relative to experiencing it behind the driver’s seat. Or maybe there’s a broader lesson about those things which are beyond my control--beyond, even, the control of my sleeping mind.
