At the beginning, I was telling my friend Amanda that I had purchased concert tickets for us to see a popular rock band perform in Gibbonsville. (One of the only details I can't remember is which band it was exactly! Also, for those of you who don't know, Gibbonsville is a tiny town about 40 minutes north of Salmon.)
On the day of the concert, I had to leave work (at the school) early in order to make it to the concert on time. Unfortunately, a young woman who used to live in the community and whose younger siblings attend my school, passed away that afternoon after being involved in a car accident and word got spread around to the people in Salmon and they had a candlelight vigil at the school. I had a hard time getting out of the building with so many people around. When I finally made it out, I knew that we were behind schedule to make it to the concert.
I went home to trade cars. I was going to get the van for our road trip because Amanda had to pick up some boxes of (I can't remember what) in Gibbonsville to bring back to her home in Salmon. But when I got home, Josh was in the van with the boys, and he said I couldn't take the van. I didn't want to take the truck, and the boxes wouldn't fit in our silver car, so I took the RV instead. (The RV that doesn't actually exist in real life.) Amanda and I decided we could just spend the night in it after the concert, so I told myself it would be alright to drive it with that validating reason. I wasn't comfortable driving it, because it was so large and I had never driven it before.
We were in a haste as we drove back to town, then down Main Street, which was really crowded (I think the vigil had spread) and when we reached Carmen, just past the fairgrounds, the entire highway was covered in water. It was like a flood, and I was white-knuckling it just to make it through the section of drenched highway, and thankfully I did just fine. After that, we pulled over at the Big Flat for me to take a breather after driving through that stressful patch, and all of a sudden there was a man in the RV. He'd followed us, and stopped behind us, and let himself in. He told us that he'd already called the cops because he witnessed the Hit and Run that we were involved in. Amanda and I were both clueless as to what he was referring to. But apparently, as we were driving through town, there were two men (both out-of-towners) crossing Main Street, and we hit one of them. We couldn't see them because the RV was on a lift kit, and we were so high off the ground, they were in our front blind spot. Neither Amanda or I believed him though, because we never even felt a bump. But then he showed us pictures on his i-Phone with evidence.
We made him get out of the RV, and we continued driving to Gibbonsville, completely in shock about what we had both just heard and saw. Right after we started on the road again, Amanda noticed a gun laying on the hood of the RV and she said "that's probably from the guy we killed". He was probably carrying it, and when we hit him, the gun landed on top of the RV as his body hit the ground. That made it all seem even more real, and I was sick to my stomach. I swerved the RV to get it off, and it fell to the right and into a ditch. When we arrived in Gibbonsville, we drove to the address printed on the tickets and discovered that the tickets I had purchased were for a cabin with a TV that was broadcasting the concert from somewhere else. It was unbelievably upsetting--that I'd killed a man trying to get to a live concert that didn't even exist (although I should've expected--of course it was too good to be true that a big band's rock concert would be in tiny Gibbonsville!).
We sat down in the cabin, and discussed my fate: I was surely going to jail, and for something that I didn't even intentionally do or was even aware of (and I didn't have an excuse like being mentally ill or in a drunken stupor). I just kept thinking if some of the events hadn't happened earlier that day (like taking forever to get out of the school, or taking longer to get the vehicle since Josh had the van), we would've left a little earlier and I wouldn't have been in such a rush, and a man's life could've been saved. I was trying to take the blame off of me and put it on something that preceded the incident that I had no control over (like the guy who sold me the fake tickets should have some responsibility in this too!).
And then I woke up. And I haven't stopped thinking about it since.
There are several aspects to my dream that I know where they came from in my conscious mind: the flooded highway is because Josh said the highway was really flooded the other day on his bus route, the boxes we had to pick up were the boxes of meat that Amanda is really getting from a butcher with her order of a half cow, the concert tickets are because I just recently purchased tickets to see Katy Perry in concert in September (yay!).
But the accidental killing of a man I didn't know, and the loss of a young woman from our community, and driving some unknown ginormous RV, and the grave disappointment of discovering that the tickets I purchased were a fraud, all of those came from some depressed, unconscious state of mind.
I can't tell you how happy I am that it was only just a dream. That I didn't really accidentally kill a man, that the young woman is still alive, that I'm not going to jail, and that we don't own that stupid RV that has a front blind spot!!
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