My Big Sur Nightmare – What Did It Mean?

Yeah…I’m gonna have to tone down the sleeping pills. I was already at half-dose but I slept straight through my alarm and wound up with one of the more disjointed Kerouac-inspired Big Sur nightmares I’ve ever had.

And it goes like this…

I was on a cross-country road trip from Chicago to San Francisco with my mother, sister & one of my two childhood / best friends – Gag. Remisicent of the cross country train trip we took when I was 7 and the sis was 3, but without Gag, complete with the look & feel but for one glaring issue: we were in my Mustang GT.

So we’re in my TARDIS-like Blue Mustang GT and we’re driving across the country and the next thing I know I’m taking pictures at my cousins’ place of the brilliant blue Pacific Ocean and the frothy whitecaps crashing the rocky shore of the pristine peninsula of the San Francisco Zoo where rested the huggable sea lions and the playful polar bears when my mother starts berating me for taking pictures to send to a Ray of Sunshine when Gag is about to go to death row.

WHAT????

The scene quickly shifts to a memory scene where Gag with my long, wavy hair addressing the media about his guilty verdict on a misdemeanor drug consumption. He’s stoic 6’4″ frame puts him a head above the crowd, but sadden with a panicked calm that one gets when working against a deadline. I drop everything and sprint to find him and I have images of him in the lower right-hand corner of my view with him and bleached hair cut in a roman emperor brushed-forward look with the hair on top longer than normal but I can’t find him and I run all over the place only to find myself back on the concrete slab where I was standing when I was reminded of the news for the first time. I fall back on the wall behind me that just appeared and slide down it into a fetal position where I begin balling hysterically when my sister comes to find me and console me. But my sister’s hair is the sandy blonde like she had in high school before it became the deep red it is today and her smile is the smile out of the pictures of her at Yosemite with momma that sit in the hallway of the oldold man’s house.

That’s when I woke up because:

1. My cousins never had a house in San Francisco along the water. It was in the Sacramento Valley in a rural area.
2. The San Francisco Zoo doesn’t have a polar bear exhibit that extends out into the Pacific Ocean
3. I’m pretty sure they won’t put the sea lions together with the polar bears
4. I’ve never been to the San Francisco Zoo
5. Gag works at a prestigious bank with a rigorous drug test policy and he’s never come close to failing it let alone ever been arrested for it
6. Gag didn’t go with us on the cross country trip though that would have been cool. Especially with Tony going, too
7. My sister would never be a blonde again
8. I can be selfish but if Gag was on death row I wouldn’t be accused of taking all my time to hide away and take pictures. I don’t care who I’m sending them to.
9. My calves still feel like they’re filled with lactic acid
10. My head still feels like it’s in a fog

I think Gag is in the role he’s in in the dream because the first thing I thought of was of the day we were in elementary school and we showed up wearing the same outfit down to the shoes. It’d explain the hair choices – it was a reflection of me:

1. Not focusing on what’s important
2. Taking sleeping pills to try not to think and go straight to sleep.

And if it’s Gag in that role I take it more seriously than if I’m in that role.

That’d also explain momma yelling at me and the sister consoling me afterwards. It also explain why everything seemed so out of joint: it’s because I’m living it out of joint and have to instead let everything come in its own time and place. Then the brilliance and beauty of the things around me will come back into sync.

Whatcha Think?

I’m just glad this is slightly easier to read and understand that The Big Sur.

Photo Credit: Thank you, Pixabay

Last updated by Finn at August 4, 2020.