Dream Journal

(Rebecca and the kids are awake at the time)

It began in a town, and Rebecca and the kids and I are on vacation. The kids wanted to go somewhere so I went with them. My more specific memory begins when we’re driving around in a self-driving car (this is new!). It’s a black SUV. I’m calling out commands like “Stan, turn around” and “Stan, pull over” and the car follows. As with all rationalizations like this, I can see out any and every side of the car should I want to. We’re driving around some shopping center parking lot. At times I thought there were four kids, and they seemed to be mostly chatting among themselves. I wonder if these others are their spirit friends, their make-believe stuffy characters.

The next thing I remember we’re in a full plane, flying over the mountains. The pilot takes us in very low to show us some trails and tell us about landscape features. I’m a bit shocked as he takes us in among the trees. “This is dangerous,” I think. “I wish he’d just take us there.” Obviously the plane is a group travel rationalization. At one point I look out as we pass 12 feet from a tree without impact. I look at the wing and it’s made of wood boards with a wood covering at the front painted red. “Wow, it’s a wood plane,” I think (the credulous dreamer). Eventually the landscape catches my attention instead. We pass into a snowy valley, and the snow is standing in towers of gravity-defying swirls. “This really is beautiful. I want to come back and hike this,” I think. As we exit the snowy valley, the plane must have descended, as I find we’re all riding in a group on bikes (new rationalization). It’s a bike tour now. After a short ride, we arrive at a roughly-built mountain carnival, with goats, sheep, farm animals, food vendors, small buildings, and fences. It feels sort of thrown together. We enter on foot with the group.

The kids are still with me and they’re focused on the carnival now. We go in a little ways with the group, but then we get separated from them. We walk about the carnival. The kids run up to a herd of goats, and I’m looking for the group but not finding them. So I’m yelling for the kids to come with me, and I get a little panicked, as I don’t want to miss the bike ride back to the plane. There was another flight later that our whole family was going to catch. I begin to ask around. I ask this teenage girl. She doesn’t respond, then gets in her car and leaves. I wait a minute to see if she’s gone to find help but she doesn’t come back. Nobody I talk to really has much of a reaction. The carnival is closing up. Rebecca has joined us now without my having taken note of it. She at one point offers me a bite of a big puffy watermelon-sized cookie I saw them selling at a stand. I’m shocked that she just took it without paying and refuse the bite.

After more searching, I find the road the bikes were on and follow it a little ways to a weird car-type thing with a few people in it. I tell them the situation and they say the only way to get to the airplane is with a vehicle. I ask if they can give us a ride, but they don’t want to. We ask another and no luck. We head back to the carnival, and now it’s just Rebecca and me. She also seems unconcerned, and rightly so. This is all a big misunderstanding on my part — a rationalization mess. I see something lifting off from the forest a ways away, but it’s not the airplane I imagined. Instead it’s a super-elongated black helicopter thing that looks like a black hornet, not an airplane. I begin to accept our fate. We walk back in, and I calmly draw a pig on the blackboard at the front entrance.