fox | dream theater

My most common dream trope is mishaps while traveling - I take the wrong train (or, more likely, I take the right train but it goes the wrong way), or I miss an exit on the freeway and drive 200 miles in the wrong direction (that was a good one because I clearly remember in the dream thinking "You don't have to turn around and drive all the way back to the exit you should have taken; you can just wake up now"), or I'm in an airport where my gate seems not actually to exist, or a bridge ends before it should and I have to jump the car over the gap as if I were in a video game. Some time about five years ago I think it was Lin-Manuel Miranda who said something on Twitter about his travel dreams being a reflex of his anxiety, and it was the bell-ringingest moment I've ever had, and it hasn't made the travel-mishap dreams stop?, but it's made them make a lot more sense to me, or it's made more sense that I have them, if you see what I mean.

Last night I dreamed that I was walking across a street in a storm, and the wind gusted so hard that it lifted me off my feet and bobbed me around in the air as if I'd been queuing to interview to be the Bankses' nanny. I woke up before I blew away (or before I landed with a thud), thank goodness, but for the first time ever waking up from a travel-mishap dream, I could feel that my heart had hammered in my chest - what I learned was how anxiety feels, back when my dad was sick and that would happen as I was otherwise falling asleep - which must have been the moment my dream-feet left the dream-crosswalk.

I lay there gasping for a couple of minutes and then pulled the weighted blanket up over me so even my subconscious would feel confident I wasn't going to be blown away again. (And when I fell back asleep, I dreamed I was in Edinburgh and wandering the streets with no success finding that one shop I've always wanted to go back to. NB I don't have a particular memory of a shop in Edinburgh that I've always wanted to go back to . . .)