Hey, Doc, you better back up. We don’t have enough road to get up to 88.

Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Last night I had one of those dreams that - at first blush - makes no real sense, but then all of a sudden, I “got” it. The dream basically consisted of me sitting in the passenger seat of this big pickup truck sort of thing which was piloted by none other than Madonna - the singer, not the Mother of God. (If you’re familiar with the Halo games for the Xbox, this vehicle seems to have been loosely based on the Warthog.) So we’re driving along normal, and then all of a sudden its pouring rain immensely hard, and the road becomes flooded, and she just suddenly veers off the road, and is plunging headlong across what is basically similar to the Florida Everglades. Just swampy patches of land, criss-crossed with fast flooded streams and all kind of madness. Just the sort of thing you don’t want to be driving a truck across. But it’s not phasing her in the slightest, and she’s just barreling along. We never sink or get slowed down or anything. At one point, I ask her politely and nervously if doesn’t she need roads to drive on, and wouldn’t it be better if we stopped what we were doing? But she just keeps going and if anything drives faster and does a masterful job of navigating this insane landscape. And I tell her how I once got into some kind of trouble because I was trying to do this same thing, drive through a road or some area which had been flooded, and I had gotten too freaked out and botched the whole thing.

Also, like sometimes happens in dreams, as I related these past events, I lived them out simultaneously. I remembered sitting in some kind of weird traffic court where I think Howard Stern was the judge. I had just this big stack of green tickets which I had been issued for whatever screw-up I had committed. And I was feeling quite bad about the whole thing. Then, all of a sudden he just nullified all the tickets, saying something about how I hadn’t been “wearing my glasses” during the other incident. I was shocked that I got off so easy, cause whatever I’d done seemed pretty severe.

So then I’m back into the truck, and Madonna eventually morphs into my highschool art teacher who I’d been thinking about the past couple days. And I talked with her about this upcoming tv opportunity I might have in NYC. And then she turned into this gorgeous Japanese girl. After that, I don’t remember anything really.

But the message of the dream now seems totally clear. About the necessity of barreling through tough terrain even when you can’t see the road. As long as you don’t give in to fear and worrying, you’ll remain buoyant and able to navigate. And the thing about wearing glasses obviously means that I have to keep my eyes open while I’m doing this. It all makes perfect sense and applies with total directness to all of what I’m finding myself in the middle of right now.