Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
A car ran the red traffic light. He noted it without surprise. What was once extremely rare was now witnessed daily. Maybe he was paying more attention now. Or maybe there’s a general trend of greater lawlessness expanding, a growing sense among people that the law doesn’t apply to them.
Or maybe there were just more bad drivers.
It was a parade of dreams last night, a dreamathon of impressive vitality and quantity. Two dreams stood out. Both involved a silver car. Silver as fine, polished flatware, with two black stripes down the middle, its front end, roof profile, and general shape and size were like the Ford GT Mark IV which was used to win LeMans with drivers like Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt in the 1960s.
I first saw it in traffic. I don’t know who was traveling with me, but I was driving. Cars were nose to tail. Then came the silver Ford from the other direction. Mired in traffic as well, it cruised past, turning heads. While I’ve described it generally, it was then I spotted two unusual features: its rear wheels were completely enclosed, and it had a vertical fan mounted in its rear end. The fan was a large one, just as used in the Chapparal 2J a few years after the Mark IV, or in the Brabham BT46 Formula 1 car in 1978. (Both the Chapparal and Brabham were banned from racing after showing impressive potential.)
All of us are watching the silver Ford. I hear someone in another car behind me ask, “What is that?” Another person in a car behind me replies, “That’s a NASCAR stocker.”
I’m like, what? That ain’t no NASCAR stocker. I laughed at the suggestion.
We saw the car again later and someone repeated the NASCAR stocker identification. I said, “That’s not a NASCAR stocker. Anyone knowing anything about NASCAR would know that.”
“What is it then?” my companions asked me.
“I don’t know. It looks a lot like a Ford Mark IV, but I never heard of one modified on the back end like that.”
Later, we’re out of the cars, walking around. There is the silver Ford. As I walked over and ogled it, a young woman confirmed my name and then handed me the keys to the silver Ford.
I was perplexed. “Why?”
“You’ve been chosen.”
That answer did nothing to relieve confusion. “By who? And, yeah, why?” Then I tried giving the keys back. “Where would I drive a car like this?” I was shaking my head, but the woman walked away, leaving me with the car and keys.
Meanwhile, in another dream a while later…
My sister-in-law and her SO are with me and my wife walking along a parking lot. SIL sees the silver Ford and says, “Wow, what’s that?” Before I can reply, someone else says, “It’s a NASCAR stocker.”
As I prepare to explain, “No, it’s not a NASCAR stocker,” with the indignation deserved, my wife says, “That’s Michael’s car. It was a gift to him. Show them the keys.”
I held up the keys. “Yes, that’s my car.”
I acquired a ‘new’ old vintage car.
My wife was with me. The car was a Porsche 911, a very clean silver Carrera variant. People came by to admire it and ask questions. I explained that it was over forty years old but that I’d rebuilt it from the ground up. Several men came past and offered me large quantities of money for it. Although I was delighted, I replied, “This is for me.”
My wife and I entered the car and took several drives. I was always careful to keep the car clean and to polish it. Wherever I parked, people came by to ask about the car.
The dream ended as I realized that there were more ways to improve it, and I began pursuing those ideas.
End dream.
Some notes. One, the dream seemed longer but much of it addressed answering the same questions from people we met and taking long drives. The roads were always well paved, and the weather remained clear and friendly. Two, my wife saw a Porsche like this about three days ago as we left our car and crossed a shopping center parking lot. Three, Porsches fit prominently in my dreams. In one memorable dream from several years ago, I was driving a 911 through a snowstorm. Overall, it was a very uplifting and personal dream for me. In a way, I felt like it was my subconscious mind reassuring me about my life.
AKA, the Four Cars Dream
It could have been known as the Big House Dream, as well. Although I was about forty years old at the dream’s beginning, I was twenty at the end.
It began with a search for car keys.
I was looking for the keys for a car I owned when I was twenty, a signal orange Porsche 914. The drawer where I kept the keys was shallow and white. Another set of keys, for my RX-7, was in there, but where were the Porsche keys?
I began going through the house looking. The house was huge, rambling, and one story, with many low stone arches. Every room was empty except for that first one, which had a desk. This was my house; I’d newly acquired it.
Unable to find the keys, I ambled around the house until I stopped in one long and wide, all-white room. One piece of white furniture, a sort of stand turned upside down, was in it. Finding a can of black paint, I painted the stand. Finding other cans, I spray-painted the walls purple. As I finished up, a large, rotund, bald man with huge, muscular arms came in.
“There you are,” he said. “I need you to come with me.” He looked around at the painted room. “Nice job.”
I knew he was my minder and followed him. I was thirty by now. My minder told me that there was someone to see me. My minder showed me to the door.
Walking up a residential street, I encountered my old friend, Jeff. I haven’t seen or heard from him in RL in almost forty years. Jeff told me he had exciting news. He’d inherited a classic Porsche 911 from a friend. The guy had completely rebuilt it, and the car was pristine. Truly impressed, I congratulated Jeff. Jeff then said that he had a car for me and gave me the keys to a BMW. He said that he didn’t need it and he wanted me to have it.
I was flattered. I tried to turn it down. Jeff insisted. I accepted the keys to the car. The car wasn’t around. Jeff was going to have it shipped to me.
We parted. He went back up a hill, and I returned to my house.
I was now in my mid-twenties, wearing a brown leather jacket which I remember owning from RL. My minder was there, along with a girl who I knew to be sixteen. Her dark brown hair, like the color of oak, was long and shiny, framing a petite oval face. She smiled often, shyly. She wore jeans and a white button-down men’s shirt. She never said her name that I heard.
The minder left us. We chatted, with her peppering me with questions. Hearing a noise, I went out through one of the larger stone arches. It was late dusk, and the light was low. This arch opened to a path that entered the woods. I thought I heard and saw people down the path. It was my property, so I was concerned about what they were doing. As I walked, I picked up several flat stones to throw, if needed, as protection.
The girl had stayed back. After I returned, she questioned me about what was going on. I told her about the people and stood ready with the rocks. Young people came down the path, but they turned away from my house and property and kept going. Not needing my rocks, I set them down. With the BMW keys in hand from Jeff, I returned to the search for my Porsche car keys. This time I found them in the drawer where I’d first search. There was nothing else in the drawer. I thought that they must not have been there before, and someone must have placed them there after I’d searched.
I was now twenty. The minder returned. He said that Jeff wanted to see me. I went to the front door. Appearing very old, sad, and tired, Jeff told me that he’d decided to give me the Porsche which he inherited. I tried talking him out of it. He told me that he drove the car and saw himself in it, and that he looked ridiculous. The car didn’t fit him, but he believed it would suit me. Handing me the keys, he left.
I went outside of my house and sat against one of its stone walls. The girl came out and asked what was wrong. I told her that I was thinking about my friends and how I missed them. She noticed the keys and inquired after them. I told them that they were to four cars which I owned, and then described them. I could see each one. My Porsche was an orange 1974 model; the BMW was also a 1974 model. The green 911 Jeff gave me was a 1971 model year, and the blue Mazda was a 1981, which I had bought. She was most impressed when I mentioned the BMW, calling it a Bimmer. She said she really liked them. I answered, “No, you don’t understand, this is a vintage car from the 1970s, a white 2002. You’ve probably never seen one. They stopped making them before you were born.” I remembered then that I’d owned a BMW 2002 in RL and became confused: was I dreaming or remembering?
More dream followed about taking a trip with other people, but this is where I’ll stop.
This was a surprisingly short dream, and all in blue with very low lighting. The framing for all of this was very tight, staying focused on me — young again, with long, thick hair — and just the car and our very immediate background, which was blurred. I’d just been bequeathed a dark blue car. Low and wide, shaped like a blunt wedge, it was built for speed and barely came up to my thighs. Its wheels were large, and its tires were fat, and its glass was darkly tinted. Dark, dark, dark blue, reminding me of the old Penske Sunoco blue on the cars that Mark Donahue drove at Indy, and Can Am, Trans Am, and sports car racing, I walked around it, looking for a manufacturer’s badge or logo, but found none.
I heard someone — and it might have been me, to be honest, because I think it was in my head — say, “Get in and go.”
Go? Go where? Get in? How?
I didn’t see any door handles. I couldn’t even tell where the doors were. There were no lines or breaks. The car was completely seamless. Its headlights were flat, narrow slits, as were its front air intakes. I thought it could be a BMW, but it could also be a Ferrari or Tesla, McLaren or Mercedes. It could be anything.
As I walked around, scratching my head and going through the question, how does the door open, the door just opened. It was a scissor type door, raising up instead of turning out. I peered into a blue interior that seemed both plush and spartan, built solely for two, and finished in dark blues that were even darker than the body.
Breathless with excitement and anticipation, I slipped in behind the wheel and looked around, sucking up details. The door closed as the seats embraced me. Arms wrapped across my waist and chest, startling and frightening me until I realized they were like seatbelts except they were part of the seat and sealed themselves, holding me tight in the soft seat. The steering wheel was small and moved toward me when I reached for it. A soft rumbling began. A dashboard with low blue lights lit up.
I chuckled to myself, thinking, someone likes blue. The steering wheel was flat on its top and bottom and fit perfectly to my hands. The car smelled new. But, how was that possible, when someone left it to me or gave it to me?
I selected a gear with a small, black handle to my right and pressed on the gas. The car moved silently forward into a blue-black night as I grinned and thought, this will be fun.
Dream end.
To begin, we were in a huge, pale gray auditorium. A long and low empty stage, softly lit with white light, is across the front. The seating is set up in blocks that are thirty wide and twenty deep. The blocks were three wide across the auditorium but I don’t know how many blocks it went back. Every seat was being filled. Filling it were men of all races, but of about the same age range, in our mid-thirties. All are dressed neat, in business casual. I wore black jeans and a long sleeve maroon dress shirt. We were excited and happy because we’d finished a course and were graduating. Seating myself in the third from last row in the middle front block, ten seats in from the left, I was impressed by the event’s sheer magnitude.
We’d seated ourselves, quieted, and were waiting for the speaker to arrive and begin when an argument emerges between two men. They’re out in one of the broad aisles between the blocks. I know both of them in the dream, though they weren’t familiar from RL. As the argument rose, it appeared it was going to escalate into a fight. I went out there and separated them, talking them down from fighting and arguing, encouraging them to return to their seats.
I returned to my seat and sat. The speaker, a man in a suit, came on stage and began talking. He surprised me by mentioning my name and citing me for my leadership. I was hugely surprised, flattered, and embarrassed — I always prefer to avoid attention.
Then, in a dreamshift, the ceremony is over. I get into a car with my father. The car is a gold sixties muscle car with a black vinyl top, chrome wheels, and chrome straight pipes. I don’t know the make or model but it was a two door. It remined me of a GM product, maybe a Chevelle.
Dad is driving. We’re going to another event. We’re on a divided highway, four lanes in either direction. Dad is driving fast, which doesn’t bother me — he and I always drive fast. The highway twists and turns, rising and falling as it follows the land, but we’re driving through a city.
We come up on another car in the left land. The car looks almost identical to the one we’re in. As I’m commenting on that, Dad pulls up close on the other car. The driver applies his brakes. That infuriates Dad. The other driver is pissed but moves right to let us pass. I note to Dad that the guy — a younger driver, who has rolled his window down and is shaking his fist — is angry. Dad says it’s because we’re faster.
As we go to pass this guy, we find our way blocked by a stopped brown UPS truck. As Dad goes to drive around it, we see head on traffic coming. We’re astonished; why is there traffic coming from the other direction? Then, I look and see that we’re on the wrong side of the highway. But how did that happen? It’s not possible because there is a cement barrier dividing the two directions.
A pause in traffic goes. We go around the stopped truck. Looking back, I see other cars following us.
A dreamshift brings me into a large courtroom. I’ve been empaneled as part of a jury. There are only men present. I’ve been accepted as a juror after passing an oral examination. Others are being questioned. It’s a festive atmosphere. I realize that I’m there to judge entries and award prizes.
Dream end.
Dreamed my wife bought me a Mustang convertible as a surprise. Let’s get into it.
To start, it was night. I left the house and drove around with a friend in his Mustang. He had some special edition, white with fat blue stripes. As he drove, I realized we were in my current town, Ashland. Stopping in the street parallel to some apartments, he powered his window down. I was asking, “What are you doing?” Grinning, he responded, “Wait.”
What he was doing was using a remote control to open and close his trunk. He’d stopped parallel to another Mustang, which was doing the same thing. Behind my buddy’s car was another Mustang, white with blue stripes, doing the same thing. “It’s how we greet each other,” my friend said. I said, “I didn’t know there were so many Mustangs in this town.”
He dropped me off at my house, which wasn’t my RL place. It was now day. A light blue Mustang convertible with its top down was sitting in the driveway. The interior was dark blue. The car wasn’t new, but gently used. I went into the house to see who owned the car and my wife announced, “Surprise! I bought that for you.”
I had to leave to pick up friends, so I took the Mustang. I picked up friends from a military unit I served in, and we drove around. We weren’t in my town any longer, but a large city’s business district. I checked things on the Mustang and commented on it. I wondered about its price, too. I also kept going the wrong way down one-way streets. I’d catch myself almost immediately and then turn around, but it was embarrassing.
I dropped off friends and returned home. A woman was there. She said she was the car sales rep and wanted to know how I liked the car. As we talked, my wife joined me and the three of us walked over to the car dealership. I was ambivalent about keeping it — I didn’t know the mileage, the year, or the cost — and told all that. The dealership was closing. We all rushed to get out the doors before it did because we were worried that we’d be forced to stay overnight in the dealership. The rolldown doors were closed, but two workers raised them and slipped out, closing them behind them. I then did the same, holding the doors up for me and my wife to leave.
The dream ended.
I was in a small building where there was a small office busy with people. It had a feel that seemed lifted from a 1950s movie. They had published something. Different authors were asked to read it and express what they thought. I was one, and my response was not like everyone else’s, triggering a new path.
Yet, I was never certain what was going on. I’d read and commented on something, but it seemed vague throughout the dream. My response made them ask me attend a conference with them. An old friend, a college professor, was going, too. He and I would go together, driving across country in a big, dark blue Lincoln Continental. He prepared to go in a hectic frenzy. I seemed baffled about everything he did and confused about what was going to happen next. Yet, soon we were in the car, driving across the country through light rain.
He was driving. I said something about seeing people needing a ride and wishing we could help them. Next thing that I knew, he pulled over for a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker climbed into the back. I offered to take a turn driving but the professor insisted that he was fine.
Seeing several more people on the side of the road, he pulled over and offered them a ride. I was leery of this, feeling that we didn’t have the room, but people crammed into the car. I looked into the back seat; it looked like a small, cluttered room. A blanket covered the rear window. That was to keep out the light so people could sleep, I guessed, but worried that it was illegal and we’d be pulled over. I again offered to drive, but he dismissed the offer.
We arrived at the conference. My impression was that it was a giant flea market, although it was indoors. People selling junk seemed to cover every square foot. Moving was done slowly, carefully, patiently. Food was being sold. I was hungry but passed on getting something to eat because I was reminded that we were having a big banquet. Someone gave me cookies, which I ate.
The head, a tall and bald white, middle-aged male wearing hornrim glasses, gave a short speech. He told everyone else that I was going to write about my impressions of the article they’d published. That startled me. Everyone applauded except me. Bewilderment was overtaking me. I was to do what, when? I didn’t understand but didn’t know how to ask the question.
Then, without me doing anything, the professor told me it was time to go. I realized that it was the weekend and that he needed to be back in order to teach Monday morning. We rushed around, packing things into the car. I offered to drive, since he’d driven us out there. He agreed. The dream ended as I entered the car and put my hands on the steering wheel.
I dreamed I was in a movie. Then I realized it was a movie and not life, so I stepped out of it. But then, remembering that I’d seen the movie, I tried recalling how it went. It seemed different, so I stepped back in to follow.
The dream was about a man protecting the Pope. Dressed in a black leather trench coat, with a black hat pulled low over his head, he was in a big white Lincoln Town Car. After some changes in camera perspective and mild action, it emerged that he’d been shot. People were after him and he was after them, trying to be proactive by getting them before they got him. I was very young, maybe thirteen or fourteen, with shaggy brown hair. At one point, I was accused of being the one who’d shot him. I was ready to proclaim my innocence, but the Pope’s bodyguard identified me and said, “He’s one of the good guys.” I was flattered to be cited as a good guy.
Now, though, I felt like I had to live up to that billing. I kept my eye on the Pope’s bodyguard, and spied others trying to sneak up on him. I went to give him warning, but he’d noticed them and was on it. It was at this point in my dream when I thought, wasn’t this a movie? Stepping out, I watched on a big screen as a fine silver thread was spooled out along a winding path through a business area. The silver thread was lit.
A fuse, I realized. But isn’t that different from the movie? That’s not how I remembered it happening.
I stepped back into it. Something was going to explode. I raced forward and scuffed out the silver thread. That ignited all manner of chaos as bad guys — in white clothing, or light clothing, male and female — rushing out to re-light the fuse and the Pope’s bodyguard fighting them off.
Which is where it ended, or was interrupted, by an unnamed cat called Tucker.
Michael Seidel, writer 