Train dream

Last night I dreamed I was at Point A and was trying to get to Point B at a certain time, to meet my friends.* Somehow my friends were all with me at the time, but we had to take different routes to get there. We were looking at an enormous route map and everyone else had a neat little short route with no transfers, whereas there was no clear way for me to get from A to B. I could take one route with one friend, but then I’d have to transfer and travel alone for a little way before I could meet up with another friend’s route.

Eventually we figured out that aha, we’d overlooked something: there were two routes that two of my friends were taking, marked in blue on the map, which would actually connect up. So I could go with one person and then ride with another person for the rest of the way. So we decided to do that. But the strange thing was I couldn’t actually start at the same starting points as my friends; I had to catch these trains or buses or whatever they were at different stations. And my friends were all familiar with their stations, but I had never done this before.

The first station was Union Station in LA.** I knew I had to get on Train 56 to meet my friend who had already boarded that train at an earlier station. I went to the ticket counter, but they said, “The train is about to leave, so you’ll have to buy your ticket from the store downstairs.” I ran downstairs to the store, but the man at the checkout counter knew nothing about it. I raced around the floor until I finally found a couple of automated kiosks that sold tickets. I punched in “56” but the display said the train had already left. Somehow I was able to race my way to another station, but there, when I tried the kiosk, it produced an error message, and I had to go back to the ticket counter, and by that time the train had left that station too. Finally I got on the train without buying a ticket, hoping the conductor wouldn’t come by.

The strange thing about the people in this dream is that Erik was with me the entire time, but he didn’t help at all except for moral support; I had to ask all the questions and do all the planning myself. And the friends I was meeting were a collection of really random people: for example, the first friend (the one on Train 56) was Yu Xie, with whom I had one summer-school class at Berkeley. We really enjoyed each other’s company during Geography, and then we basically never hung out again. So I’m not sure what she was doing in my dream.

In many ways it’s a very boring dream, and it wasn’t even particularly tense or exciting for me while I was dreaming it. I just had to write it down because I suspect it is very deeply metaphorical on many levels (ha ha, and the train station had many levels!). You could say that this is a dream about my life path, because it’s one I’m forced to travel alone, though Erik is literally along for the ride. Or you could take this to mean whenever I get together with friends, I feel like I have to do all the planning and the hard stuff, while no one else helps out and just literally shows up for the party.*** I’m sure there are other interpretations as well — and if you’ve got any, I welcome them in the comments!

*They weren’t really called Point A and Point B, but I don’t know what these places were.

**It looked nothing like the actual Union Station in LA, unless you count that it had several floors and was a bit confusing to navigate.

***I feel like this sometimes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a constant gripe I have.