A dream

Graham had to be at Phillips at 7 this morning to get on a bus for a field trip to Carowinds. It was my job to get him there, and my alarm was set a little early. Naturally, I was in waking mode prior to the alarm going off.

While I was in that state, I had one of those dreams. I had agreed to leave my car somewhere so it could be used by my friend Nick. The place where I was was a shifting amalgam of Princeton and Chapel Hill, so the parking spot I was leaving the car in had features of each place, now the train station, now a shopping center. The car I was leaving was the old Volvo, the blue 240 I had inherited from mom right after Mary and I got married, actually the car my mom bought as a present to herself upon her divorce from my dad (odd to think how quickly one event followed upon the other, within the lifetime of one car). At one point in the dream it seemed to me that the car was a convertible and I couldn't figure out where the button was to put the top back up, which was important because for some reason I had agreed to leave my phone in the car for Nick's use.

My friend Elizabeth was with me and I felt some responsibility for getting her to the train station on time. Therefore I felt time pressure.

At a very high level, I think the key thing about this dream is that I had overextended myself for some reason. Why was I leaving Nick my car? More importantly, my phone? Why did I feel responsibility for getting Elizabeth to the station on time?  Or, fundamentally, why did my subconscious load all these additional burdens onto itself?

It is probably not entirely incidental that today is my wedding anniversary, and therefore also Natalie's birthday, and also Leslie's, facts that have been obscured in the lead up to Natalie's graduation this weekend and the arrival of guests (Rob and Mary Lee) and the graduation party we are throwing. Things that kinda slipped my mind as I was focused on getting Graham ready for his field trip -- the first big school field trip he has ever gone on.