The Great Escape from the Freeway at the Wonderland Carnival

You know how sometimes when you wake up from a weird or unsettling dream, you really want to share it with someone but you have a hard time piecing it altogether in a way that makes sense to relate?  That’s where I’m at right now, so I’m typing it.  My friend T told me that if I was looking for blog ideas, I should take inspiration from my subconscious and write down my dreams on my blog, ergo, I’m writing this here and now.  Ed note after writing: You may not find this interesting; I realize now that it was definitely not my most captivating dream.  It is also unfinished—I woke up part of the way through and couldn’t fall back asleep to finish it.  I wonder how it would have resolved.

For the record, I typically have crazy dreams.  I have an overactive imagination, and I think my subconscious tries desperately to make up for my boring life.  Gotta live somehow, right?  When I say I have weird dreams, I mean they are never boring or “regular” stories that could happen in everyday life.  Well, occasionally they are that way.  But most of the time, they are fantastic stories that could only be captured by a book, a movie with awesome special effects, or an episode of one of my TV shows (for example, I’ve dreamed up—literally dreamed—several brilliant ideas for Glee and Bones TV episodes.  I’m sure I could sell these ideas for a small fortune if I wrote them down.).  Bear this in mind while you read the following.

My sister K and I were the only people I know who were in the dream.  I don’t remember how it started, but it seems as though we were at an amusement park/state carnival of sorts, running around and having fun.   We were probably a few years younger; I don’t think K was married.  I’m the youngest, and there are only two years between her and me but four years between her and our older sister C.  Growing up we spent a lot of time running around and participating in various shenanigans together, so it was not surprising that we were doing so in my dream.

K and I decided to get on the freeway to go somewhere.  We got into a convertible (a trashy one, mind you—no rich snobbery for us!) and got on the 10 freeway in California.  If you asked my conscious self where the 10 is in California, I would have no idea and could only tell you that I have been on it once or twice.  But my subconscious is all-knowing, so we were on that freeway.  It was soon after this happened that the scene seemed to change to the state carnival, and I recognized that we had been there the whole time.  The freeway was actually a racetrack for kids, you know, the kind for the toy cars to ride on.  K and I were in one of those toy convertibles (K was driving), and we were small enough to fit yet too large at the same time.  I realized at one point that there seemed to be a tour guide directing us, showing us “the sights” and talking.  These were almost exclusively the car track, which was sometimes like a roller coaster, sometimes like train tracks, sometimes like a kid’s toy car track, and it was mostly enclosed in tunnels with occasional peeking out around corners to see flashes of the park.  The track led progressively higher in elevation, with ups and downs along the way, but it was at least a story or two in the air.  K and I weren’t really paying attention to the tour guide; we were talking and laughing at this or that.

Traffic on this road was pretty congested; we were going very slowly.  Always, we would have a quick spurt of road and then would end up stopped bumper to bumper for a minute while the tour guide showed us something like the inside of the track (It was a terrible tour idea).  But here was the thrill of it: when we would gain a small stretch of road quickly, one or both of us would invariably fall out of the car onto the side, probably because we were too big for the cars and there were no seatbelts anyway.  We would laugh and have to pick ourselves up and get into the car quickly again before traffic cleared and we were to take off again.  It was usually me who fell out, since K was the driver.  I would get back into the car just in time for us to start moving.  Somehow when I got back in the car, I’d fit in the seat again.  It was like I would grow or shrink à la Alice and Wonderland.  It occurred to me that the tour was more like a sadistic game in which the tour guide tried to time the traffic stops just so that we would lose a passenger or two periodically along the way.  The Quillan book of the Pendragon series comes to mind.

One time when I fell out of the car, we had stopped not in a tunnel but in one of those stretches that was open to the world.  As we were high up in the air, I almost fell over the edge and had to hang on for dear life.  K almost got out to help me up, but the stop was shorter than the previous ones and the cars in front of her had already started to move forward.  She looked scared that I wouldn’t make it up, but I somehow climbed back over the edge.  I had just done so when she was forced to move forward by cars behind her and I waved her forward, saying I’d catch up.  (I wonder now if she wasn’t really driving and the cars were automatically moved along the track like most roller coasters.  It’s possible.)  I quickly climbed onto the track hands and knees style, following the cars behind her and hoping I could catch up quickly.  It was a silly hope; they were driving and I was crawling because I was too large to stand up and run.  I seemed to grow larger still, and that slowed me down—maybe being in the car was what allowed me to shrink again, and without that I would grow exponentially.  I was too large and had to squeeze through tunnels Great Escape style, trying in vain to catch up with K and my tour group. 

As I was scrambling and squeezing through the tunnels, I thought maybe I could take a shortcut, but there were all kinds of tracks around us like the real SoCal freeway system.  None of them were clearly marked (figures), so I had no way of jumping onto an unfamiliar part of the 10 freeway in hopes that I would find K there.  I quickly realized I was way too far behind her to catch up now, and I didn’t know what to do.  I jumped off the track and found myself at the beginning of it, but I couldn’t find the end of the track.  I figured I’d just wait at the front of the ride for K to get off and meet me there, but then realized with a panic that I didn’t have my cell phone on me to call or text her.  How would she know where to meet me?  (That was what it was like before we had cell phones.)  I walked around, hoping for her to find me, but I had been walking around for a few hours with no sign of her…maybe something had happened to her?  Maybe she had fallen off and gotten stuck somewhere in a tunnel?  Or maybe she had not been able to find me and couldn’t reach me by phone?  Maybe she had given up on me?

Someone rang our doorbell and I woke up from my Great Escape from the Freeway at the Wonderland Carnival dream, feeling dissatisfied and unresolved.  It was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to go back to sleep to finish my dream, but I couldn’t.  Instead, I lay there with my brow furrowed (ignoring the door) as I tried to figure out what this meant.  I don’t believe dreams are always significant, but I believe they often have aspects that represent feelings or thoughts the dreamer has.  I have my thoughts about this one, but my interpretations are too personal for a public blog.  Think what you will.  I know this was not a very interesting dream—the plot was much less intricate than my usual dreams.  If you’re still reading this now, I apologize, though you’re the one who came to my blog in the first place.  The dream was still puzzling all the same.