prompt: drift, title: carl jung and the restless in misc. flash fiction

In my dreams, I’m always drifting. Drifting off the road, drifting off to sleep behind the wheel, to dream within a dream. I drift into some second sort of sleep while I’m highway-driving and then I fight like hell to open up my eyes again. To not die. I never do, though, I just keep spinning my wheels through cycles of being awake and falling asleep, even though I’m already sleeping in the real. If this layer of our dreams is the really-real one, of course, a thing we can never truly know.

I am exhausted in my own dreams and I don’t know what that means, though I have a few ideas. It is, after all, a hell of a metaphor for being alive, highway-driving. You’re kind of on automatic and yet you’re kind of not. You think that you’re just rolling forward on a predetermined path to goals well-defined and inevitable, you get lulled into a false sense of security and then suddenly, you’re out of gas. Suddenly, you hit the rumble strip and shake with shock. Suddenly, some van comes in from the left and t-bones you into oblivion. Or maybe you just drift to the side and flip into spring’s last remaining snowdrift. The more certain you are, the faster that flip comes.

I spent a few years doing driving jobs, as a Hollywood gofer, as a medical courier, sometimes I am working those jobs again in dreams where I fade into almost crashing but never quite get to the boom-bada explosion. I am duly overwhelmed by how tired I am and how much more work is left to do, in those dreams, wondering if the crash would be something of a mercy. Old Willie Shakes called the next life “what dreams may come” after all, the final dreaming within a dream within another dream from which I will eventually awake. Whether this life feels more real than either of the former, I suppose, is another matter entirely.

But mostly, I’m just drifting. Drifting side-to-side on asphalt, an arrow nocked toward a distant horizon that will never come, because that’s how this planet Earth works. Drifting in and out of sleep, as well as sleeps within sleep, trying to not fall into the second sort of slumber, less from any kind of self-preservation but out of obligation. I must be driving from somewhere to some other where, I must have something I promised I’d get from one point to the other. Momentum and others’ expectations standing in for personal motivation or an idea where the hell I’m going.

In my dreams, I’m always drifting as I guess I’ve been for much of my waking life, this maybe actually-real life. But this is what we have and all we can do is hope there’s something fulfilling up ahead. Hands at ten and two. Eyes on the road ahead. Don’t look back so long that you crash.

But at this point, I wouldn’t turn down a decent map.