Bullet Train to Tinseltown

I had another train dream last night. Trains have been big in my life. My dad was a station master for the B&O railroad all the time I was growing up, as was his father before him. It meant we had passes to ride, and my grandmother took me to both coasts: to the monuments to history in D.C. and the monuments to childhood in Disneyland, more than enough to give me a taste for travel.

I find now that trains are one of my four big symbols: rivers, bridges, buildings, and trains. Rivers represent my own source and creative energies; bridges are transitions; buildings are scaffolds for structuring my life; and trains take me where I want to go.

I've had lots of train dreams. Usually they are transport in a quest of some kind - I am looking for something or someone. The trains are often city infrastructure, rather than distance trains, and I am usually running to get to one in time or anxiously waiting to get to my destination. Sometimes I am confused and get the wrong train, and sometimes I miss it all together. But they are all transportation to somewhere I want to go and carry a sense of excitement and fun, even when I am lost.

This dream was different. It was a small city train except old fashioned and more like a circus train with open cars and flatbeds, and it took me through what looked like a commercial center and then curved away toward more residential streets. It felt open like a trolly, and I didn’t care where it took me. I did not have a book and was thinking that since I didn’t know where this train would take me, probably I would have to ride all the way to the suburb end and then come back. I figured I could look up a map on my smart phone when I felt like it, but I was apathetic – not unhappy but unfocused and just riding for the ride.

I found the dream alarming, as I am hardly ever apathetic. Still, when I asked myself what it meant, I had to admit that the last few months I have been working from a playlist, just checking off finished tasks, not engaging in the stack of Things To Do that are usually my raison d'être. The truth is, there are so many tasks in that stack right now that it could just be that I am feeling overwhelmed. I've become a passive observer of my own trip and not a player, taking the ride and missing the significance. Tsk tsk!

I need a good thrashing. Aren't I the one who likes to be busy? Aren't I the person who loves to make things? Glories in the construction? Plunges immediately on finishing one thing into the sea of the next? From houses to books to histories, building requires many steps and a very big scrap pile. I need reminding that I am a process kind of girl and quit feeling sorry for myself that this time I made such a huge mess to sort. After all, I like sorting.

And I am going to get off that back-and-forth circus train and find me instead a bullet train straight to tinseltown:)