Dreamlands – Part 1 of several

Anybody that has known me for a while knows that I’ve always had a penchant for the weird and wondrous side of life. But sometimes life surprises even me.

This happened a good few years ago now, but stays fresh in my memory.

It starts the night before a long car journey. I had split the journey and was staying overnight with my parents. Just sleeping in the same bedroom in which I’d spent my youth was strange enough, but the dream that came to me was stranger yet.

I am driving along a stretch of road I know well. Ahead of me the fields are a very bright green, but they seem to waver, as if in a heat haze. Suddenly my view is obscured by smoke. In the rear view mirror everything goes red and, as the smoke clears, I see a truck heading straight for me.

And then I woke up.

The dream had the quality of reality, and, unusually, I remembered it all, even hours later. I put it to the back of my mind….as I said, I had a long drive ahead of me.

The drive went fine, until I reached the Scotland England border. Just as we entered England, I looked in the rear-view mirror.

The fields behind were bathed in bright sunshine, so green they looked luminescent. But they wavered, in a heat haze that seemed to be rising from the back of the car. Suddenly thick black smoke billowed behind us and the dashboard lit up in red warning lights as the engine blew up.

I remembered the dream, and I had already pulled into the hard shoulder, just as a truck barrelled past from behind – a couple of seconds later and it would have flattened us.

So there you have it…..smoke behind instead of in front, red light in front instead of behind, but the rest as it had been in the dream.

I pay more attention to any vivid dreams nowadays, but so far none have proved such a close glimpse into how things really work.