There has been a development in my progress towards
retirement; I am having symbolic dreams.
When I first was promoted to Principal, I very often woke from harrowing
dreams that I was driving a bus out in the country somewhere along impossibly
angled roads. I would clutch the
steering wheel and look hysterically down the embankment that fell away to
nothingness thousands of feet below, thinking, “who put me in charge of the
bus?” The buses weren’t your nice
European tour buses with plush seats and scented bathrooms and fabulous sound
systems, either. They were the old
fashioned nose buses with broken windows and doors that flapped ominously open at
every bump. Now that I think of it, I
don’t know if that was a commentary on my school district, or the fevered memory
of buses I travelled on during my childhood in Mexico.
The question of my suitability to lead has been more or less
resolved by my trying never to think of the import of my position, though
sometimes when I drive by my school at the weekend I am suddenly awash with the
fearful thought “I’m in charge of the safety of all of that, and everyone in
it.” And I require a stiff drink and a hot compress to recover.
Now that my bus driving days are coming to an end, I have
started to have a repeated dream that I am on a bicycle hurtling down a steep
hill on a badly pock marked, gravelly road, in the dark. In the latest version of this I’m starting
down the steep hill on the bike, and it’s dark, and this time I resist. “I’m not having this bloody dream again,” I
shout in my dream, “I won’t do it!” So I
try to get off the bike, only it’s stuck to me, so I force myself awake. Clearly I have an obsession with the
life-as-transport metaphors, or a fixation with bad roads, but I’m pleased by
my ability now to tell my dreams to piss off.
No doubt I gained this ability through my years of coping with dubious
passengers on my bus.
Everyone is afraid of something. I can cuddle up to a snake or a spider with
the affection of an eager scientist, but I’ve had a life long fear of riding in
buses on bad roads, a product of seeing headlines in newspapers my whole young
life in Mexico. “Bus plunges over cliff, killing all.” My second great travel fear is going down
hill on bikes. I clutch the brakes and
squeal down hills with my heart in my mouth.
My husband is in the next county by the time I make the bottom, lying
under a tree napping.
I try to tell him that the bike is symbolic of my new sense
of vulnerability as I head into the unknown.
I don’t want to say ‘going downhill’ so I skip lightly through that
part. “I thought we weren’t interpreting
dreams anymore.” He says. He must have
read something that said dreams were just the result of the cleaning crew going
through your brain at night sweeping up refuse; jumbled images being tossed
into recycling. “But since we are now,
last night I dreamed…” When we were young boomers we kept journals full of
obsessive dream images, thinking one day they’d mean something, or form the
basis for the next great new science fiction hit. They never amounted to anything but a way to
get through our 20s.
Or it could be an unconscious reminder that my new economic
status will require downsizing. Hand in
the keys to the bus, here’s your bike. It was left by a fellow that went
downhill fast, but it’s in pretty good shape.
Nothing a spot of paint won’t fix up.
