I was leaving work at dusk. I walked out with my coworker Richard, we rode the elevator together and then parted ways. We didn’t talk much, just mumbled a few things about complaints we’d dealt with during the day.

 My car was parked in this hideous cement basement at my office. It was dark and gloomy, not an inviting place to be at all.

 I got in the car and switched on the lights, trying to figure out how to get out of the basement. I didn’t remember parking there or how I got in. Mine was the only car in the dimly lit room. I decided that all I could really do would be to circle the basement, scanning the walls with my headlights until I found a way out. It seemed to take a very long time to consider this and decide to act.

I wasn’t scanning the walls very long before I discovered an opening. It was littered with papers and boxes, and it wasn’t very wide….not the sort of opening that seemed to be meant for cars. I looked around again, but didn’t see any other way out. So I eased the car forward, slowly, deciding that even if I scraped the sides of my car as I went through the opening, I probably wouldn’t hurt the paint too much. If I just went slowly, I could probably buff out any scratches I might get.

The car went through much more gently than I expected. It connected with the walls, but just barely, nothing too bad. But as I came through, I noticed a concrete pole in front of me. Oh well, I decided, I’ll just bonk into it, there’s no other way to get out so I have no choice. I cringed as the front of the car connected with the pole. The sound was worse than I thought it would be. Once I was past the pole and had freed the car, I got out to inspect the damage.

Even though I hadn’t been moving fast, and even though I thought it hadn’t been that bad, the car was in terrible shape. The headlight was broken. Stomach lurching, I walked around the side and saw that the back roof of the car had been crushed down and the right side was caved in. I didn’t stop to consider how that had happened. I knew I couldn’t drive the car all the way home, so I called Paul.

“It doesn’t sound too bad,” he said when I told him about the damage. I was terribly embarrassed that I’d done this and did not tell him that I couldn’t find any other way out of the basement where I’d parked. “I’ll come take a look and we’ll get it taken care of.”

“It’s pretty bad,” I told him doubtfully, looking back at the ruins of my beautiful car.

And then I woke up.

It was Saturday morning, my alarm was going to go off in fifteen minutes, and it would be time to get up and go to the airport to leave for California. I rolled onto my side, mind swirling as I tried to process the dream I’d just woken from. Common sense had not played a very big part of the dream. How would I have gotten my car into a basement? And how would it be all smashed in just by rubbing up against a pole?  Silliness.

What a strange dream.