Dreaming of alarmed cars

When alarms slumber

As vivid dreams go, they could be stranger than fiction and that is how I felt this morning. I had been out partying the night before and set the alarm on the television to wake me up at a time I knew quite well I might not be able to respond to.

A few hours sleep after a night out cannot necessarily give the body the needed rest and recovery to approach the next day with any vigour. A smarter side of I did consider using the alarm on my mobile phone which with its distinct sound would get me up when my mind computes that the sound is for a particular purpose and a response ensues.

I must have settled into rapid eye movement sleep when the alarm went off, I heard it well but it had moved into the setting of my dream.

Memories and innovation

The driver and my mother had gotten out of the car and activated the security system of the car which from what I can recall was an Audi TT – the addition to the context of my dream must have come from John Grisham’s effusive praise of the model in one of his novels I can no more recall*.

The system was quite advanced that we were kept locked up in the car and it started a few manoeuvres to keep us in the car – the self-driving was not erratic though I noticed it had problem with pedestrians that suddenly crossed the road without obeying traffic signals – it swerved rather than hit them, I thought that was cool.

Some idea for reality

So, we tried to call the driver, riffled through all the glove compartments and found that he was a professor in a university and just our luck to find the details and phone numbers of all other member of his faculty listed but his.

Then I thought about why I had not bothered to note the telephone numbers of my father’s friends – well, some idea I need to explore in reality, I am told they all ask after me whenever I speak to my dad.

It stopped with exaggerated prompting

This cacophony of security went on for a while and then we saw the driver run up to meet us and the car return to its original position after the fifth time of rigmarole. I remonstrated with him as he gesticulated to us to stop the car – well, we could not, he had to and he jabbed incessantly at his key fob to stop the alarm and the car’s waywardness or dare I say the security breach anti-flight algorithm.

Then the alarm stopped and my phone rang, all in the dream, I was making some adjustments to allow the driver get in the car so I tossed the phone to him to answer the call, when he handed the phone back, I mustered all the calmness to tell the caller that I had just been messed about by a mad robot of a car due to the built-in security measures.

Triggered by another ring

Just then the bedside phone rang and it was the reception that had been alerted to the fact that my television alarm had been ringing for the past 5 minutes and I had not responded to it.

If that ring had found its way into the dream, I could be sure that the door to my room would have been mowed down to determine if I was about, around and alert-able.

This I believe represents the danger one faces when you sleep with some background sound on, there might be cases where such external stimuli might well get integrated into your dream sequence, I could do with next week’s lottery numbers but in other cases I need to expect my mind to discriminate between dreams and reality, then instruct the appropriate system to respond as required.

* The Summons by John Grisham