I had a dream the other night that didn’t feel symbolic at first.
It just felt… accurate.
In it, I was driving people around for money. Not to anywhere meaningful—just movement. Pick up. Drop off. Keep going.
At some point, I fell asleep.
I don’t remember pulling over.
I don’t remember deciding to stop.
I just remember waking up in the backseat of my own car while a family I didn’t know was driving it.
I wasn’t afraid.
I was confused.
We arrived at a large tan building—brick, institutional, permanent. It looked like a school or a government office. Across the front, in block letters, was the word Columbia. Each letter a different shade of white. The “O” was the brightest.
I asked the family who they were and where I was.
I turned to look at the building again—and when I turned back, they were gone.
No argument.
No goodbye.
Just absence.
That’s when I noticed the rest.
The gas tank was empty.
I had no money.
No identification.
No sense of how long I’d been asleep or how far I’d traveled.
I woke up from the dream feeling lost—not in a panicked way, but in the way you feel when you realize you’ve been somewhere else for a long time.
I think the dream was about usefulness.
Driving strangers for money made sense in the dream. It was necessary. Productive. Functional.
But I wasn’t going anywhere.
I was facilitating everyone else’s movement while slowly disappearing from my own.
At no point did I crash.
Nothing dramatic happened.
I just stopped being conscious while my life kept moving.
When I woke up, I wasn’t at the wheel anymore.
The family didn’t feel threatening. They felt inherited.
Like responsibility passed down quietly.
Like roles you take on because someone has to.
Like expectations you don’t remember agreeing to.
They drove my car as if it belonged to them.
And when I questioned it—when I asked who they were—they vanished.
Some roles can’t survive being named.
The building mattered too.
Columbia felt like a system.
Authority.
Institution.
The kind of place that exists everywhere and nowhere. The kind you arrive at when identity is shaped by obligation instead of desire.
I woke up there because that’s where people end up when they’re tired—inside structures that keep moving whether they do or not.
What stayed with me most was what I didn’t have.
No fuel.
No resources.
No role to point to and say, this is who I am.
It didn’t feel like failure.
It felt like being unassigned.
In waking life, nothing dramatic had happened either.
I hadn’t imploded my life.
I hadn’t lost everything overnight.
I was just exhausted.
Exhausted from being useful without being present.
From competence doing the work of identity.
From movement without meaning.
The dream didn’t tell me where to go next.
It just showed me that I had been running on empty—and that I was awake enough now to notice.
Waking up doesn’t feel triumphant.
It feels quiet.
Disorienting.
A little unfinished.
There’s no map when you realize you’ve been living on autopilot.
Just a still car.
An empty tank.
And the decision not to fall asleep again.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet.
But the engine is off on purpose.
And for now, that’s enough.
Sometimes clarity doesn’t arrive as answers.
It arrives as consciousness returning to the body.