Chapman's Log

I just had this really messed up dream that was very vivid. It also kept me asleep through my six morning alarms and caused me to miss class. It seemed to have some meaning to it, so I thought I would share it on WordPress to keep myself from forgetting it.

In this dream, I was in Dothan with three unidentifiable friends riding in my car with me. It was night time, and I think we had just left the Peanut Festival or some other event at the Dothan fairgrounds. It was very dark on the road, which was winding around through a fairly wooded area.

All of the sudden, I started to notice that I was passing cars on the road that weren’t using their headlights. Not just a few cars, but every car on the road had no lights on. In that area, they wouldn’t even have been able to see the street until my headlights illuminated it. In normal fashion, I flashed my headlights at them as they passed to signal them turn theirs on.

In the dream, I got so freaked out by the fact that no one was using their headlights that I failed to notice the giant roadblock in the road, plastered in big stop signs, barriers and cones. It looked like the roadblocks that keep you from entering new areas in the Grand Theft Auto games. Very strange. Before I hit them, I realized that my headlights weren’t illuminating them at all. As if my headlights had actually been off the entire time I was driving and I inexplicably could see the road.

Anyway, I locked up my brakes with little time to spare and (very realistically) I remember sliding into the road block, which smashed the front of the car and sent us spinning and flipping into the woods. After we got out of the totaled car (surreal seeing your own car totaled in a dream), my friends kept telling me that they could see the roadblock for miles, and that I was too busy flagging people down for not using their headlights to notice it. However, I kept telling them that my headlights didn’t illuminate it at all.

The crash felt so real in the dream, I could feel the g-force and the pain of flipping through the woods. I got a weird vibe from this dream, like it had some kind of meaning to it. Was I too absorbed in telling other people to drive safely and turn their lights on, causing me to not pay attention to my own driving? Were my headlights off just like the rest of the people on the road?

I feel like this dream was trying to tell me not to spend so much time pointing out the faults of others when I have plenty of my own, some of which could potentially be the very thing I’m pointing out to others. I suppose that would make me a hypocrit. But then again, I can’t think of anything like that at the moment to support that message. Dreams do come from the subconscious, so maybe I’m just hiding it from myself.

Or it could be completely random. I did watch an episode of Lost last night where Hurley found an old VW van, and with Charlie riding shotgun, he drove it down a hill toward some rocks blocking the path in an attempt to jump start the engine. Just as he cranked up the engine, he swerved with barely enough room to pass the rocks blocking his way, very similarly to how I hit the road block. Only my driving wasn’t as successful and I hit it.

Could it be related to Lost? Or could it be something my subconscious is trying to tell me? Who knows, but I haven’t had a dream that made me ponder so much in a long, long time.