The Lab Notebook

Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm looking out my upstairs bedroom window in our family's house [our first one that I lived in as a kid - the one that didn't have upstairs bedroom windows, it was only one story in real life], watching my parents and sister drive away in their new Honda SUV. They drive up onto a freeway offramp, where they get out of the new SUV and get into a different vehicle [bus, I think?]. The now-empty SUV is a self-driving car, so I watch it come back down the freeway offramp and drive itself along one of the main roads through our neighborhoods. I realize that if we're going to get it back, I'm going to have to go chase after it. I know that it's brand-new, my parents just bought it, and since I'm home alone, I'm now responsible for it.

I run out of the house and chase after the SUV, on foot. You'd think it would either keep going in a straight line and crash into something, or else it would be programmed to either pull over and stop or come back to our driveway and park itself, I think, but no. It's programmed to follow the streets and turn at randomly-selected corners, of which there are many in our tract-home neighborhood. Fortunately, it does so very slowly, slowly enough that I almost catch up to it a couple of times, even running after it on foot. I follow it into the neighborhood on the opposite side of that main road I mentioned, just north of the one where our house is. I lose sight of it and yell, "NANOOK!" before I remember, It's a car, not a dog. It can't hear you. [No surprise it's a Honda; my parents have been loyal to them for many years. The odd part is that they never name their cars in real life.]

I finally see Nanook the Honda SUV parked nose-in to the chain-link fence at the front of somebody's front yard, which stops it for long enough that I can get close, but it gets away from me again before I can get in. [I think - my memory gets fuzzy here. It was a fun and amusing dream, though.]