The Lab Notebook

[This started out as a regular dream, but it was after my alarm had gone off and I was only partially asleep and partially awake, so I think I was actively using my imagination to keep this sequence of events going, and it felt like I was doing so from outside it, as if my imagination were a video game controller. Hence the shift from teal and present tense, representing a regular dream, to green and past tense, which is what I use for those times when I'm not sure if what I experienced was a really low-quality lucid dream, or just me imagining stuff, or what.]

I'm in the brown car with P. We're both sitting in the back seat, but I'm still controlling the car. [I honestly don't know if I'm just reaching forward and grabbing the wheel every so often, or I'm just telekinetic.] I remember that we've driven this way in dreams before. I say to P., “Thanks again for the ride.” Apparently, she brought the car to pick me up from somewhere and take me home. We're driving up a major street in the area where we grew up.

At some point, we shifted from riding in the car to riding on bicycles. She was on a little pink bicycle that one or the other of us had when we were little. We continued our journey back toward the house on bicycles. I realized that on the route we were going, we would eventually get to a street named Amaranth, where I would get hit by a car and killed. I knew this because I remembered dreaming about it before. [Now that I'm fully awake and writing this, though, I don't remember dreaming about it before. More false memories, I think.] As we got closer to Amaranth Street, I felt a cold chill of fear of my impending death for a moment, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I was also aware that none of this was real. We reached the corner where we could turn to get onto Amaranth Street, or take a different route. I said, “Do you believe in fate? I don't.” P. decided to take the different route, the one that wouldn't take us onto Amaranth Street at all, and we continued riding.