Ever have a dream about driving?  I dream about it all the time.  Not regularly, but enough for it to be a theme in my night time endeavors.  In my dreams I am usually forced to take the wheel after whoever is driving becomes incapacitated in some way.  Either the person leaves me with the car thinking that there is no way I'll have to drive, or some crazy situation occurs.  I should mention that when I take the wheel, things happen.  Usually the car is going over 90 mph and the brakes don't work.  My job is to make sure I don't crash the car, which is no easy feat when you are plowing through red lights and dodging other cars going at normal speeds.  Parking the car usually involves being on top of another car.  Why this makes sense in the dream, who knows?  In one of these dreams I was forced to drive a car around a never ending amusement park.  At one point the car and I ended up on a carousel and I was forced to jump from one ferris-wheel car to the next as the wheel turned.  Does this make any sense?  No, of course not, it was a dream.  Eventually, I had to "jump" off the carousel onto the roof top of a building.  All of this was happening because, if I remember correctly, there were too many pedestrians on the ground.

My driving dreams all follow the same pattern.  Complete loss of control.  I don't like having control taken away from me.  I don't especially like being told what to do, or how to do things.  This is not news.  I don't mind following along (if what I'm following makes sense), but I do like to have at least some semblance of rationality attached to whatever I am doing.  Maybe that's why I am not the biggest fan of organized religion.  There is no rationality, just traditions and mindless followings.  I know that isn't true for everyone, but I think most of the masses that call themselves religious have never stopped to think about what or why they do the things they do.  Faith, by definition, is not rational.

Dreams are not rational.  They express our inner fears, wants, desires.  They show us things that maybe we would otherwise not think about.  There are those that think dreams have the power to show us glimpses of the future.  Just bits and pieces, something that hasn't happened yet.  I am one of those people.  Is that rational?  Not at all.  I am a mass of contradictions.  I am human.  I generally enjoy dreaming, there is a sense of freedom that comes along with it, a sense of omnipotence perhaps.  In our dreams anything is possible, anything could happen and usually does.  Waking up can be welcome, or it can be a slap in the face-- depends what you've been dreaming about.

(Feel free to analyze my driving dreams for yourself.  No Freudian comments please.)