Bad dreams...

I had two really bad dreams last night.

In the first one, I was driving the Explorer on the freeway. I was in the #1 lane (far left) of about 3 or 4 lanes. To my left were railroad tracks. They were normal railroad tracks, but embedded into the ground like they are in light rail or at the stations. There was a Metrolink train coming toward us on the tracks, a normal occurrence for people who drive the 10 freeway (except in real life, there's a concrete barrier and several yards in between them and the cars). I remember thinking that we were approaching the Cal State area, and in my dream I was thinking about how the train stops there. In real life, the freeway pulls away, and the carpool lane goes up a ramp to the bus stop above the train station. In my dream, I remember thinking that the train would cut across and traffic would stop as passengers got off the train and walked across the blocked freeway.

The train was probably almost 100 yards away from my car when it derailed, flopping onto its left in a sea of sparks. Remember, I'm going full freeway speeds in the left lane, and the train's traveling a good speed too... I look to my right but it's packed with cars and there's no way I can get into that lane in time, so I swerve left over the tracks, across what would have been the path of the oncoming train if it was not in my lane now instead. I can feel the bumping of my tires going over the tracks and I stabilize myself paralleling the tracks and the freeway so that I'm not riding on the rails. The train whooshes by my right windows, and I'm looking for the best way to get back to my lane when I'm past it, when another train coming the same direction (on the same track, or did I skip one track onto another?) hits me head on and I wake up.

I wake up with a warm sensation all over my body. It's not adrenaline, I don't think, because my heart isn't racing. I've compared it in the past to a burning sensation, when I've been awaken by dreams of death in fire.

After a while, I go back to sleep and have this second dream. In the second dream, I'm at a waterpark. The first thing I remember is I'm next in line for this attraction. It's actually a rather clever idea I think. You're laying back in a chair and there's a gun that you operate, blasting flying objects that come at you (flying gorillas or something weird like that) in an arcade-style screen at the top of the slide. The screen shows an image of you riding down the slide. There's a non-flying threat somewhere by the flume toward the bottom, that only an expert marksman could have shot in time. It points a funny looking weapon at you. It looks like a water hose about 3 inches in diameter, with a big box a few inches from the end housing the firing and aiming mechanisms. It turns out to be some kind of air cannon, long continuous blasts of air hit my face. I cover my face and turn away, then it stops and hits my side. Next thing I know, I'm released into the flume and am riding the real slide.

It's kind of a cool idea, huh?

Anyhow, after I get to the bottom, I see my mom and her cousin. My mom's cousin needs a little help walking because the ground is wet from the attraction's runoff, so I suggest that I help her walk up the exit area (I would have thought the exit area is the bottom of the slide, but maybe that's only for people who lose the game!). I'm helping her walk up, the floor is squishy and moist, it's weird. Then there's an area where you can step over into the proper entrance line, and she goes over and joins my mom in the entrance line, apparently we've gotten past the worst of the bad footing area and she can take it from there.

So I turn back and expect to see the walkway behind me, but instead it's a slide flume. Alright, I think, I'll slide down. But as I sit down I realize that it's very narrow, and it's blocked by quarters (I guess you have to put in quarters to play the game). I poke at the blockage with my toes, jarring the quarters loose presumably to slide down the flume. I think to myself that in the future I should clear quarter blockages by picking up the quarters and not kicking them away. It still looks too narrow, but I push off from a handhold I find (I have a lot of experience in how to go faster on waterslides, remember, since I was a manager at two pools that had slides) trying to build up speed to get through. I'm not able to get through, though, it would in fact be a tight squeeze for even a young child. So I decide to go through the gap my mom's cousin went through and go down the ride again instead, but when I look upward, that path has also closed itself off. I realize that I'm in a coccoon type structure and there's no way to get out. I'm about to scream for help when I wake up, again with a mild warm sensation, not as strong as before.

In the past, I've had several of these dreams that I remember vividly. I don't seem to remember much about my dreams on a regular basis, these are an exception to that rule...

In about 1999/2000 I was visiting my sister in Las Vegas with the rest of the family. Two parents, two sisters, two brothers-in-law, two nieces, one nephew, and myself makes 10 in a two-bedroom apartment, so several of us were sleeping in the living room. I had a dream that I was in El Monte, at my other sister's house and we were waiting for someone to get ready to go somewhere. The car is across the street, and I'm walking out the side path toward the street when I see airplanes flying overhead. In the background, I see the red and white water tower, a feature that El Monte does have, but not in that location. I sit down on the curb to wait for whomever it is we're waiting for, watching the planes, because they're interesting and I have nothing else to do, then I realize that they're dropping something... The water tower explodes. I'm shocked, confused, then I follow the trail of another bomb with my eyes only to find it's coming toward us. I have a pillow in my arms for some reason, and I grab it in a hug and try to bury both my face and my knees into it, crouching into a ball. I wake up feeling like I'm on fire, a feeling that subsides only after several minutes. It was about 3am, and I couldn't get back to sleep all night. Luckily I had a friend in the UK I was able to call during his lunch break who calmed me down.

Probably in 2001/2002 or so, I had a dream that I was a passenger in a car driven by someone who closely resembled a girl I knew my sophomore year in high school. It was night time, there weren't many cars on the road. We're on an interchange, and although the street curves left, the driver continues to drive straight. We go off the interchange and fly through the air. I try to think of how best to brace myself for the impending impact, and I see the ground rushing toward us in the headlights just before I wake up, again feeling like I've been burned. I haven't liked that kind of intersection ever since. (Like the 118 west to the 23 south, big shadow = big fall.) I also prefer to drive myself when I know the road ahead is possibly scary, rather than be a passenger. The lack of control over the situation was the scariest part of the dream.

In 2005, I had a dream that I was sitting in a car waiting for someone or something, and out of nowhere some people (probably all male) come and try to get into the car. I tried to hit the door locks, but someone had already gotten in, I think through the back driver's side door. They were trying to pull me out of the car, and I was putting up as much of a fight as I could. I remember that some of them had baseball bats... I don't remember much about this dream now, but Charles and I were somewhere in my mom's Camry and someone got into the car mistakenly thinking it was his friend's car, and it made me very nervous... Charles took to tapping on the window before opening the car door if I didn't see him coming.

Then in the past year or so, I had a dream that I was driving alone and somehow got distracted by something and went through a barrier on an overpass. In a seemingly endless flight, I had enough time to try to look for my phone. Instead of calling 911, I had (in the dream) resigned myself to my fate, and wanted to call my husband and say goodbye. I hit water before I found it.

So, that makes six dreams so far that have lead to this rush of something... I should try to figure out what it is...