Recurring dreams

When I was little (like 4 or 6 or so), we had a flat tire in our rustbucket ’59 Impala; Dad pulled off to the side and changed the tire. For whatever reason, that event stuck with me and I would dream about it. In the dream, I usually stood across M-40 (on one side of town or the other), looking at the car as the wheels and tires sagged like one of Salvador Dali’s clocks. I had that dream several times, even after the Impala got traded in, and never figured out why.

These days, I dream about going back to college. The dream itself is a lot more variable than the Impala dream — in one dream, I’m standing outside the dorm I lived in, chatting with some people; I might be walking to a classroom in another — but it’s always the beginning of the school year. In last night’s dream, my old roommate and I were moving into a largish two-bedroom apartment that had a third bed right in front of the door. The centerpiece of this dream was a large clothes hamper on casters, lined like a baby’s bassinet, that could tip its contents into a basket on the floor. Toward the end of our dream, the landlady was getting ready to move it out thinking we didn’t want it in there; we protested and then she showed us how it worked.

Other details I remember (more or less in order) include:

• Thinking the bed by the door was mine, until I realized I had my own room


• Seeing the hamper


• Plugging in the clock-radio that currently adorns the dresser on the wife’s side of the bedroom, and throwing some luggage on the bed


• Wondering if my ex-girlfriend would want to sleep over, and wondering why I even thought I wanted her to (the breakup was not amicable) — dreams truly do have their own #%@*&!!! logic


• Making a list of things I had to drive home to get — a 10-hour drive in the dream and when I was in college; it would be a much longer trip now, and I wasn’t college-age in my dream


• Being interrupted in my list-making by the landlady coming in to get the hamper

That was the first time in some months that I’ve had one of those dreams. I haven’t figured out what the deal is with those.