Driving to St Andrews

[davidn]

The dreams have definitely come back in a big way - they're getting longer and more vivid.

Two nights ago, my dream started in a building that looked like my work garage but that I knew was situated somewhere in Aberdeen. I had to get down to St. Andrews, my usual route when I was in university, because there was a meeting there that I had to attend, and I was bringing quadralien and my brother-in-law (the disorganized one, not the miserable one) with me because they had separate reasons for needing to go down to the same place.

I had to navigate my car down from the top of the car park through an awful one-way system where I had to go out on a straight road and then curve back around to the front of the building, and I picked up quadralien without issue. But my brother-in-law had got distracted while I worked out the route and was watching some sort of basketball-like game that was taking place in a large cage suspended in the air outside. I told him increasingly desperately that I needed to leave right now, and he repeatedly assured me that he was 'just coming', but eventually I had to decide to leave him behind and set off down the road without him.

The first few miles were strange, with things like the car doors being not quite shut and needing to be slammed closed again, and at one point I found myself in the back seat and having to reach around the driver's seat to get my hands on the steering wheel. Eventually we stopped at a petrol station on the right hand side of the road (because even though this was supposedly in Britain, my brain seems to default to driving on the right now) and I got a huge person-sized bag of grass seed out of the boot of the car.

I walked along the kerb, pouring the fluffy proto-grass out of a cut corner at the bottom of the bag in a neat stripe along it. I looked down the road and realized that my plan to reseed the grass from here all the way down to St. Andrews was going to be an impossible task, but I satisfied myself with drawing a border of grass inside the island formed by the kerb around the petrol station, and noted to come back and look at the effects later once the grass started to grow.

We went on our way again, and Quadralien wanted to stop somewhere but I realized that the brakes on my car were too ineffective and we couldn't stop without a lot of notice. I remembered that the car had always had really difficult to use brakes, where you really had to stamp on them to get any effect - which is absolutely untrue in real life, but I know that I've had a lot of other dreams about driving a car with unresponsive brakes. Or maybe this dream just... told me that I had had them, and I believed it - I can't remember, now...

After a lot of forward planning, we stopped at a parts shop, and I looked at the brakes that they had available, which looked like plastic spheres with protusions on them. I selected the most expensive one because it looked the sturdiest and most effective, and then called the dealership where I had bought the car to make sure that this didn't void my warranty. After the call, I chose to call my brother-in-law as well, who sounded angry that we had left him behind.

I agreed to drive the forty miles back to pick him up and start the journey again, but at that point I woke up.