Years ago I started having a recurring dream. Not an exact dream, but a recurring theme that kept popping up. I would be driving, but when I hit my brakes they didn’t work. It’s not as though they were cut, but more like they didn’t totally finish the job. I would slam them down but only slow down without coming to a complete stop. It was as if I was driving on ice and I kept drifting even when my wheels weren’t moving, although there was no ice to be found. It was an unpleasant feeling and therefore an unpleasant dream. It happened every couple months or so, which was quite manageable.

But then it started happening more frequently. They would come only a month apart, and then only a week. At one point I had this dream 3 times in one week. It was starting to really bother me and stress me out a bit. Knowing dream research tends to be dubious at best, in desperation I tried to figure out ways to get rid of this dream. I read several theories that recurring dreams are messages from your subconscious, your own body trying to tell you something. That may very well be possible, I figured. Often your body knows it’s sick before you do. Sometimes you refuse to acknowledge things about the way you feel even though you know them to be true. Whether this shit was true or not, I just wanted to try to stop having the dream. So I figured that maybe I should write down everything that pops into my head immediately after I wake up from having it, and maybe it would reveal something to myself.

I didn’t have to wait long to give it a shot. A few days later I had the most intense nearly-lucid episode of the dream yet and woke up immediately afterwards with my groggy half-logical mind full of words ready to leap onto paper. I first wrote a quote that was said by my friend who was sitting in the passenger seat in this particular dream which only makes sense to me now so there’s not much point in writing it here. But here is the rest of what I scribbled down (slightly edited so as to make a bit more sense):

“Life doesn’t slow down, and I can’t stop it
but I can choose the direction
sometimes there are accidents
sometimes it’s good to have someone in the passenger seat
sometimes there are tight squeezes that look like you’ll never make it through
or even feel like something’s going wrong
yet you emerge scratch free
sometimes it seems like there are scratches even when there aren’t
and it turns out it wasn’t so bad
sometimes you have to improvise and go in a direction you didn’t expect, to avoid danger
but you can still get where you’re going.
It never stops exactly where you want it to
Don’t want to hurt anyone along the way
I’m worried about things being too perfect,
so I lose a little control while going with the flow.”

I have never had the dream since the day I wrote that down.