What Do You Make of This Dream?

This is the dream from which I awakened this morning.

I've apparently become a trucker hauling heavy equipment to be used by a road construction crew on Montgomery Road in Cincinnati and I'm heading north on I-71. My truck breaks down on the Montgomery Road ramp. Traffic starts stacking up behind me immediately. But I notice that it's also jammed ahead on the ramp.

Apparently, the construction crew needs the equipment I'm hauling quickly. So, I go to the back of my truck, unstrap the equipment, roll it off, and start pushing it up the ramp toward Montgomery.

On the way, I pull out my cell phone to tell my wife, who evidently works at or near Kenwood Town Centre at Montgomery and Kenwood Roads, that I may be running late. But, I tell her, I'll be walking to her, rather than driving. "That's OK, honey," she says, "I'll see you when you get here."

Mind you, I have no sense of struggling with this massive piece of equipment. I'm just moving along and it's gliding like the two-wheeled fork hand trucks we used whenever I worked at warehouses or loading docks. Only, it glides like those little trucks do when they were empty.

After I get off the phone with Ann, still pushing, I decide to call the truck driver ahead. How I know him or his number, is a mystery. But I call him and hear, at the other end of the line, the voice of Alan Greenspan. Evidently, we're old buddies and he's generous in sharing a working person's philosophical ruminations. Greenspan tells me that the key to enjoying life is to change jobs about every three years. "That's what I did," he tells me, "and I've had a ball."

By this time, I've pushed the equipment to where Greenspan is standing next to his truck, presumably awaiting help. We laugh, engaging in the kind of the yelling back-and-forth I remember workers engaging in back in my factory days, the dialog of people who can't wait to get home and away from their grimy jobs. They laugh to forestall the sense of futility they feel about their work.

Just then it dawns on me and I tell Greenspan: "Hey, you worked for years at the Federal Reserve. You were there more than three years." He throws his head back in uproarious laughter and we both wave as I push on.

By this point, I'm moving onto Montgomery Road, westbound toward Kenwood. I can see the road crew ahead.

But suddenly, there's a scene change. Evidently, it wasn't the crew itself that needed the equipment I'm pushing, but the company for which it works.

I find myself pushing this thing onto the grounds of the construction company's offices. There's a gravel parking lot, surrounded by twelve-foot fencing topped by barbed wire.

I stop pushing in order to report to someone in a small, squat, brick office building. Along the way, another trucker--remember I'm a trucker in this dream--starts walking alongside me. I find the guy annoying. I don't know him from Adam. But he's acting as though we're old pals. "Hey," he says, "I wonder when they'll let us off." He keeps up his patter, yapping at me like one of those little annoying puppies that won't go away when all you want to do is take a walk.

His question riles me up. I want to get out of this place in a hurry. I'm already late for meeting my wife.

We go into the building, which looks like any dispatching center you've ever seen, whether for a trucking company, smalltown police department, or highway patrol outpost.

There's one guy in charge there, bustling around. My annoying companion asks the bustler, "Hey, are we going to get out of here before 9:30 tonight?" "9:30?!" I cry, "I can't be here until 9:30. I'm meeting my wife for dinner."

"Hey!" the annoying guy says to me--and he's still smiling--"they always feed us dinner here." He says it as though it's a real privilege, a perk of the job. He enjoys it. I feel trapped. I want to be with my wife.

It's then that two things dawn on me. First, I'm an independent trucker. I don't work for this company. Having duly delivered their equipment, I don't have to hang around. I can walk away. Second, this is a stupid dream. So, I stopped it.

Now, several points should be made about the dream itself.

First: When we lived in Cincinnati, we often would take the half-hour trip from our house to Kenwood Town Centre or to visit with our friends there. But we rarely would have traveled on I-71 North.

Second: I have no idea what the piece of equipment I was pushing might have been. It was yellow and about the size of the cab of a crane used on construction sites. Lots of its paint was scratched off from heavy use. It clearly wasn't new.

Third: Alan Greenspan was in work clothes when I saw him.

Fourth: While I've done many jobs over the years, before I became a pastor twenty-four years ago, I never drove truck. I've never even learned to drive a stick shift, which may explain why I was broken down on the exit ramp!

Fifth: I remember dreams infrequently and I think that few dreams are imbued with much in the way of meaning. I doubt that that this one is either.

Have you had any dreams you've remembered lately?