The four-lane highway stretches out in front of us in long, graceful curves as the car glides effortlessly over the road, barely touching the pavement it seems. Nina is sitting in the front passenger seat. I'm directly behind her. We pass huge, box-shaped warehouses that sit glistening white by the docks along the bay. The road rises in an overpass that arcs around the bay spread out before us. The azure water shimmers as if every molecule were alive.
"How beautiful!" I say to Nina. She nods in agreement. A pure white bridge arches over a river. My breath is taken away by the vision of a perfect city cradled on all sides by shoreline.
Then I notice the driver's seat. There's no one behind the wheel! I panic.
"Who's driving?" I ask Nina.
"Don't worry about it," she says. I do worry about it, though. The more I worry, the more the car gets out of control It veers wildly back and forth across lanes suddenly filled with rush-hour traffic. Tires screech, horns scream. The dream ends.
What do you think this dream means?
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A dream workshop I participated in 4 years ago taught me something that has been reinforced again and again in the dream group that subsequently formed from that workshop. That is that noone else can interpret your dream. So when we get together to share dreams with each other, we respond to each others dreams as if they were our own. "In my dream I am (or I feel)...." because in truth, we can take anyone's dream and make it our own and it means different things to different people. I become very tense when someone says "Oh, that means blah, blah", or "I had a dream like that and it was about (whatever)", because this dream is usually an intensely intimate part of who I am.
Instead, I find it very helpful to tell my dream and listen to my friends remind me of other themes they've heard me speak of in past dreams, or to remind me of icons, myths, symbols that appear in the dream telling. I pick and choose from their insights and always come away with more understanding of my dream, the journey my life is taking me on, what I need to know about myself right now, and insights into what's important.
I believe that when we sleep we are open to a deeper understanding of ourselves that we don't access in the waking world, and that the people in our dreams are often parts of ourselves. And sometimes, the people in our dreams are visitors. I had one particular dream of my son, Neil, in which I know for a certainty that he was visiting me and telling me something about where he is. Other dreams he comes into are parts of myself and/or my relationship with him and with his death.
So it is with all that in mind that I thank you, Richard, for sharing your dreams and here are my thoughts on this dream "The Unknown Driver"....
In my dream, I am initially accepting this journey I have been on since the death of my son. In fact I am so accepting of this journey that at first I don't notice that there is no driver, nothing navigating me along this road. It doesn't seem to matter that there is no driver because I don't really know where this journey is taking me. I feel comfortable sitting behind Nina as though, even tho' she's not in the driver's seat, in some way she is ahead of me, has a better idea of where we are going or is more accepting of the journey, and something about that is comforting to me. I feel that there is something beautiful, peaceful, about this journey. Nina and I are clearly in this together. The bridge feels like a connection/bridge between worlds. I feel like I am both separated and connected. I am on one side and there is another side. I can see it and it is okay, beautiful even, and connected to me and my world in a peaceful way. It feels like there is something right about my world.
It is that feeling that there is something okay/right that I am suddenly conflicted. It can't be right. How can it be right if noone is driving? In the waking world someone has to be in control. But I am not in control. Nina is not in control. If we were in control my son would not have died.
This dream may be reminding me that I am in a struggle between acceptance of my son's death and the terror of my future journey through life without him. And that makes a lot of sense to me - that I would go in and out of that. I feel very fortunate that I have a partner (Nina) that I can go through this with.
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