Life In The Slow Lane

I rarely dream, but when I do it's never very fun. This is not to say that what I have are nightmares, I never have nightmares, but when I dream a completely clear vision of who I would be if I didn't repress certain characteristics of myself  comes to life and disgusts me. It's beyond me to analyze such dreams in any obscure Freudian way, because my dreams aren't complicated. They are simple, standard and basic. They are destorted pictures of everday occurances that everyone I know experiences. The best way to describe these dreams, is to compare them to the frustrated driver in a traffic jam, completely boxed in on all sides, yet constantly pushing his way into other lanes thinking that maybe this one will have the answer he's looking for, the path to the open road. Rarely is this the case though and what ends up happening is this frustrated driver sets himself back even further, as he sees the lane he was originally in start to move and then realizes that the lane he merged into is the one with the hazard blocking it. Rather than breathing and accepting his mistake and patiently waiting it out, he completely flips and starts screaming at the person in front of him. All he can see is the back of a head and he focuses on that head as he yells, "Move! Moooooveeee! Oh my fucking god, if you don't move up I'm gunna KILL you." It's at this moment where the driver has transcended beyond driving, often times becoming completely incoherent to the fact that he's still behind the wheel. Once the rage begins to drip from the brain and into the body, the driver morphs into a product of all of life's frustrations combined. It starts with the steering wheel, the driver punches it. It feels pretty good. So he looks around to make sure nobody is paying attention and he starts to laugh. "Ha ha aaaaaaaaahhhhh. Pull up, FUCKING PULL UP!" The driver throws on his blinker. He wedges his car closer and closer to the lane marker and as the fender begins to cross it, his lane starts moving so he whips it back into the center. They roll for a minute, and his frustration subsides until he's abruptly confronted by the bumper in front of him and has to slam on his brakes. The driver slides for a second, but the second is long enough to think about how it feels to be involved in an accident. That slow crunch of plastic and metal, the deafening sound of no return, the point where  you actually hit something, you actually hit someone.  This time the drivers lucky though. His vehicle comes to a stop less than an inch from the bumper in front of him, the same bumper he's been fighting with since getting stuck in this lane. The driver closes his eyes as he feels the burn of adrenaline rush through his body. It makes him feel nauseaus and shakey, and embarrassed for being such an idiot. Normally, this would be enough to make this man stop, recompose himself and continue on with his daily duties, but today he's stuck in traffic and there's nothing normal about being trapped inside of a metal box, no matter how many others experience this same phenomena. So the frustrated driver acts irradically. He rips off his seat belt swings open his door and puts one foot outside the vehicle, but then the traffic starts moving again. So he quickly jumps back into place and puts his car in drive. He can see the next exit now, and no matter how far it is from his final destination, he swears up and down that this is the exit he needs to use. He begins to merge and as he merges the other frustrated drivers become even more so and begin to gesture and yell through their windows, their seatbelts restraining them like buckles on a straight jacket. Amazingly, it has only taken half of a lane change to turn the frustated driver from the offender, to the defender. All of the sudden this same driver promising to rip the head off of everyone around him, is now waving his hand and mouthing the word "sorry", in the most exagerated and insincere of ways. He makes it over two lanes, only one more to go. The exit is approaching faster now, faster than the 8 miles per hour the speedometer brags about. So he gets a little more agressive. Another frustrated driver, who ironically wasn't frustrated before, but only recently became ill once surrounded by frustration, speeds up to close a gap that would have allowed our original frustrated driver to exit. He can feel the rage beginning to drip, but with exiting as a fleeting, yet still viable option, he controls himself and tries again at getting over into the slow lane. The frustrated driver signals and moves forward with one eye on the traffic in front of him, and one eye in his mirror and unintentionally begins to drift right. Closer he drifts to the metal box on his right and closer he gets to freedom. It's move it or lose it time for our driver and so he goes for it. He cranks the steering wheel to the right and suddenly realizes he's about to side swipe another motorist. Violently, he jerks the car back into his lane and then once again has to slam on his brakes because traffic has stopped. The exit is literally outside his door and he contemplates for a moment simply leaving his vehicle to fend for itself and walking down the offramp. He can't though. He isn't afraid of the legal consequences, he's simply afraid of being without a car, a human anomoly in itself. The frustrated driver accepts defeat as he watches the exit get pushed behind him inch by inch and he is stuck again. He was always stuck, but for the breif period of perceived freedom, he felt progressive. So the frustrated driver grips the wheel tight, he flips through static, commercials and the Mexican stations on his radio, he rolls down the window just a crack and sinks his finger tips into the weather stripping that fills the outer seam of his door. A new battle ensues between each exit, and the war does not end until much later that evening when he is finally home, in his apartment, yelling at his girlfriend to prove how tough he is. This is what I dream about: traffic jams.