I started having this dream in college. It used to happen more frequently, every couple of months. Lately it’s an annual affair.

I resolve into the dream, with naked understanding of how I got there and what I’m doing without ever being able to recall. Dreams are like that. I’m in a car. The car is full of other people. They could be my friends or family. I’m much younger than I am now, or I feel much younger. The delicate qualities of being a child have been wrapped around me. The others in the car don’t regard me as a child though. They are normally engaged with each other. They could be talking or arguing or playing a game. I can engage with them too without difficulty.

We are all in the back seats. The car is long. More of an SUV. Its interior is tall, but not tall enough to stand up in. The upholstery is grayish with well-worn seats. I might notice a thread-bear armrest or a tear in the ceiling, I might not. The car impresses familiarity into me like hands into wet clay. It’s the type of car a teenager might inherit from an older sibling who’d gone to college, who originally bought it off Craigslist. I’ve been in dozens of these cars in my life. The car I learned to drive in was similar, but this is one that’s never belonged to me.

The car is moving. Trees and landscape track across the windows. These are familiar sights. They’re the same rolling features of rural Midwest America I’ve grown up with. More than familiar, they are recognizable. They’re the telltale signs of heading to my parents’ house, the home they still live in, and the one where I grew up. My weight shifts as the car hugs the camber of the two lane road. The tug of inertia is too noticeable. The car is speeding. I look toward the windshield. We’ve crested the hill by the factory at the outskirts of town. I can see the farmland on either side of the road. The bottom of the next hill is visible, veering to the left before the road is obscured by trees.

No one is in the driver seat, of course. This wouldn’t be that memorable of a dream without some kind of strangeness. But no one else seems worried about it. They don’t mention it or seem to care. I’m not exactly worried either. But an unsaid expectation that I should be driving unravels from my mind. As if the placid unease of the dream so far was a ball of yarn in my head. Much too slowly, anxiety fills my veins. I usually can’t look away from the windshield.

I might try to reach the drivers seat, to rend control of the vehicle. Sometimes I do, and the dream is led into other, less stressful scenarios. Other times I, or someone else, is able to maneuver the car from the backseat using some other form of control, like switches and knobs or a phone or even telekinesis. Sometimes I am able to ignore the driverlessness and continue talking to the other people inside, where the dream conforms more to those conversations.

But most of the time I try to reach the driver seat. I might try to clamber over the other passengers. I might try to convince or plead with the others to do something. My seatbelt will become stuck or I will be ignored by the others or the car’s interior to become as navigable as an Escher drawing. Something will stop me from getting to the driver seat. The car will continue down the road, forever. In reality my parent’s house is no more than a minute away from the spot I realize there’s no driver in the car. In the dream, however, I will never reach my parents’ home. The road doesn’t extent and the landmarks don’t stretch out. We don’t teleport to a point further up the hill so that the landmarks repeat in a loop. The car doesn’t slow down, neither does time. The car simply speeds toward the bottom of the next hill, forever.

Often times the dream fades away. It becomes fuzzier and less defined until I’m not dreaming anymore. I will wake up some time much later. Other times the dream continues until my alarm rings. My memory of regular dreams tends to evaporate throughout the day. But when I have this dream I normally think about it for a few days. It’s been almost two weeks since I had the dream last, and just about the same amount of time since I started writing this post (I’m an extremely slow poster). I’m not one who lends much psychological relevance to the content of one’s dreams, nor do I believe they are prophetic or mystical. This dream has particular, private significance to me. Whether or not it’s revealing about who I am is up to you. It certainly makes sense to me.