Dream - An angel beside me?

Late Tuesday afternoon, December 16, 2008, I fell asleep while sitting in a chair, and had a nightmare about driving while sleeping, unable to stay awake, with a presence in the passenger seat driving for me.

In the dream it was night and I was in Nevada, driving back toward Arizona. It was late, perhaps the middle of the night. Earlier in the dream I had been driving more normally I think, and I think some other things had happened, maybe something in small rooms. Now, though, I was very tired and kept falling asleep. I was driving while sleeping, trying hard to wake up, but my eyes would close almost immediately and my head would fall forward and to the side, and I would droop over to the side.

In a bend of the road where it curved sharply to the left and then back out again, I came across, on the left side, at the innermost part of the bend, two women in a very small open room sitting at a table. The room was an opening in a very large dark wall that went by that section of the road. The wall partly followed the contours of the road, but in straight, slightly angled sections. The road curved in close to the wall here, so I was right by the room where the women were.

As I came up to them, they turned to each other and giggled. They seemed to be giggling at me and my situation. As I drove by, I leaned my head out of the window, my eyes pleading, and spoke to them. Even though I said only a few words to them, asking for help I think, I got the impression that they were already aware of me and had been following my situation, monitoring me in a way, though I'm not sure for what purpose.

I was quickly past them, then, and turned my attention back to driving, trying desperately to wake up. For a while, a thick ridge a couple of feet high ran by the side of the road. I sometimes reached out my hand and hung onto it, my hand rapidly sliding along its rough, lumpy surface in the darkness. I was able to see the wall-like ridge but not much else, and was driving almost totally blind.

At some point, I became aware that someone was in the car with me, on the right, driving. The person shouldn't be there and was not always visible. I thought it must be an angel or a ghost. I guess I was glad it was there but I didn't feel that I could or should trust it to continue driving for me. I didn't know who or what it was or what it was capable of doing and under what conditions, and how long and reliably it would continue to do it. Perhaps it only operated temporarily or in emergencies, and couldn't continue doing it for long periods, especially if I simply gave up control and let it go on unattended.

I thought of how I must have gone around the terrible curves of this section of road in the darkness, not even realizing it, just following one curve after another without realizing where I was, picturing in my mind now a point in the trip in mid Nevada where the curves were. I was afraid I was headed for them again and tried to open my eyes but they kept shutting again. I was going very fast and just getting glimpses of things. It was light outside now, but it was very hard to keep my eyes open for more than a second or two at a time.

I could see some giant forklift-like thing ahead moving slow, evidently some kind of farm machinery. I was coming up very fast on it. I swerved around it at the last second, but it wasn't me doing it, not my current awareness. Though I seemed to be at the wheel sitting up straight with my eyes fixed on the road ahead, I wasn't actually in my body, I was just a dim, dark, foggy, reeling presence behind and to the side, with maybe my hips and legs partly overlapping my body.


I woke up and thought I heard the phone ring, but it evidently didn't. If the phone rang, it was important to answer because my mother was still in the hospital. She was going to have the operation today, Tuesday, to deaden the part of her heart that had been racing. The day before, Monday, they had put in a pacemaker.