Last night I dreamed I was on a trip with Martha. The road was bad, and the ground around it was bad too. It was so bad in one spot that traffic was routed completely off the road, and they'd laid down narrow metal pathways for cars' tires to fit in as they drove around the blocked road.
After getting past the bad section of road, we needed a breather and decided to stop at a gas station. Martha went into the bathroom at the gas station and I waited. And waited. And waited. At some point I decided she wasn't coming out, and apparently I no longer had access to the car. Maybe she took it in the bathroom with her? I don't know. Dreams make perfect sense within their own context but fall apart when exposed to light. Anyway, I spied a van from my former workplace (as evidenced by the logo on the side of it) and decided I could hotwire it and be on my way — and would meet up with Martha farther down the road. So that's what I did.
I drove the van for an unknown distance before realizing I had committed a pretty serious crime in "borrowing" it. I decided the best course of action was to wreck it, which might catch it on fire just like on TV and thus destroy the evidence. So when the van was going at a decent clip, I opened the door and rolled out into the grass.
The van kept going, and I watched as it drove down the road on its own. Eventually it careened off to the side, turned into a church parking lot, crashed through or drove over several cars in the lot, and exited the rear of the parking lot and into the woods behind the church. At this point I realized two things. First, it was obviously not going to wreck and catch on fire. And second, I'd left my coat and mp3 player inside the van — plenty of evidence to reveal the perpetrator. So I started my pursuit of the van on foot.
I must say I've never had the real-life experience of chasing a van through the woods on foot, but if the dream is any indication of what it would be like, I'd be just as happy to never go through that. The van drove deep into the woods and though I put up a good fight, I eventually lost sight of it. I heard it crash, though, so I still had hope of finding it. Meanwhile, my former workplace had been alerted to the situation and had sent out a recovery team — and I found I was quite lost.
So, the race was on between myself and the recovery team to find the van. On the other side of the woods was a small isolated town, and the van had crashed somewhere there. It had also left tire tracks and destruction through people's yards — said people now on the alert too and well-armed. As you can imagine, the dream soon evolved into me spending more and more time dodging the well-armed and angry people from the small isolated town. I never recovered the van and decided staying alive was a higher priority.
I awoke, still on the run, legs flailing.
If anyone out there wants to play armchair psychiatrist, I highly encourage it.