Spirit Mom, Staying Alive

        Being sick always kills my dreaming, and I’ve been sick a lot recently.

        I do remember a short bit from a couple of nights ago. My mother’s spirit came into our bedroom. The garage cats had escaped, and we couldn’t get Purina in. My mom’s spirit laid down on the bed, and coaxed Purina into the house. Not the garage, which is where she prefers to be, but actually into the house.

        This morning I dreamed I was driving back to work. Escondido had vanished, except for the freeway. Even the exit ramps were gone. The radio sputtered and was filled with unintelligible sounds that merged into static. I shut the sound off.

I pulled over, because I realized that I wasn’t wearing any pants. I had several pair in the trunk of Little Red, for some reason (I do keep a pair of old grubby workpants, just in case.) I couldn’t decide which to wear, to tossed a coin to determine light or dark, and then again to pick blue or black. Blue jeans won out.

        I then realized that I was only in a T-shirt, so started rummaging through my pack for a flannel shirt to go with the jeans. It looked like I had been living out of my car. As I was rummaging the traffic began to slow to a crawl. A camper with a popup tow behind stopped out in the lanes across from where I was parked. There were a bunch of tweens in the tow behind, stacked in there like carelessly tossed rag dolls. One girl climbed out of the pile and was trying to get the attention of the driver of the camper. The chubby little brunette (What I call American Teen sized) tried to walk out along the tow rig to where she could wave at the side mirror. Traffic began to move and she fell off the bumper of the camper. She managed to grab the ladder on the back and was able to run fast enough to keep up, and to avoid being run over. As the tow behind began to block my view I was pretty sure she’d managed to pull herself back up off the ground.

        There was a little red shoe left behind the camper and tow behind, I was pretty sure it hadn’t been on the road earlier.

I reached into my car to honk the horn. Suddenly I had the conviction that the others in the popup behind the camper were actually dead, and the driver really didn’t care about the one he was nearly dragging behind, because he or she assumed the girls were all dead.

I pulled out my cell phone to call 911, only to be told the phone could not connect that call. I began to drive along the shoulder, hoping to catch up and stop the camper. I called 411 to get the number of the Escondido police, only to be told there was no such city. The same thing with Poway and San Diego. I could see the Interstate 15 signs, but apparently I was not really in this world. I drove for a couple of minutes, finally catching up with the camper and its panicked looking passenger. I waved to her, and when she turned to look at me, I could tell, by the gray pallor and the matted hair and the missing eye, that she was also dead, she just didn’t know it yet. She acted like she couldn’t even see me, or my car.

I stopped the car and looked back, through the windscreens of all the cars on the freeway. All of them were dead, and none of them seemed to know it yet. I wondered if I was dead, too, when “Staying Alive” started playing on the car radio.

Ad astra per technica,

FF