I am standing in a motel parking lot approaching the finish of a running race, waiting for the woman
I have been running with to catch up to me so we can finish together. Feeling strong, I jog in
place with quick little steps but as I approach the finish line, which is the doorway into a motel
room, I crawl on hands and knees barely able to move. After finishing I am walking back towards the
shuttle bus with Carol P and I notice the smell of thyme so I
tell Carol "You smell good. Keep it up". The thyme scent is coming from a flower bed across which
we had just walked so I explain "It's thyme", but she ignores me.
A tractor-trailer truck is parked along the road down to the lower parking lot where my car is
located. As the shuttle bus comes down the hill behind me I want to scoot under the trailer of the
truck to hide but there isn't enough clearance. As I approach my Subaru I noticed how it looks more
like a very narrow semi truck and I realize how different the newer models are from this older one.
The hood, silver and black, rises to a narrow peak like an A-frame and the windshield on the driver
side is obscured by rust.
Susan is driving and I am in the passenger seat as we pull out of the parking lot and start down a
gentle grade towards the brow of a long steep hill. Suddenly Susan jumps out of the car to go
get something leaving the car still rolling slowly down the road towards the hill. I cannot stop
the car so I grabb the wheel and try to turn the car off the road to stop it before we reach the
hill. Susan runs up and tries to open the driver's side door but it is locked. I reach over and
open the back seat door for her but the car is too full of stuff and she can't get in.
The car, which feels more like a large truck, continues to roll down the road towards the hill but I
am at least able to turn the wheel enough to get it off the road. It swings up to the left until we
are pointed diagonally up the hill, then we roll backwards back across the road and across a steep
hillside covered with beauty bark and recently planted saplings. Coming to a stop we begin to roll
forward again carving a broad arc across the hillside and back across the road. As we repeat that
pattern, dropping lower with each arc across the hillside, someone shouts out "Headed for area 58!"
In the six months following my 58th birthday I experienced my first minor symptoms of ALS and I
began running with Darchelle. Just over a year after my 58th birthday I discovered that I had
ALS. That is
the significance of the ominous "area 58" warning at the end of the dream. When I turned 58
everything would blow up. At the beginning of the dream I am running with Carol, a coworker at
Expedia with whom I ran a few races in my first few years of running marathons. In the dream she
prefigures my running friendship with Darchelle, with whom I associate the scent of thyme and whom I
would not meet until nearly a decade later.
Trying to hide under the tractor-trailer truck is a brief reference to seeking safety, and it may be
only a bit of a stretch to see the similarity between my Subaru in the parking lot and a semi truck
as representing my inability to find safety in my marriage.
That strange Subaru which Susan and I drive out of the parking lot probably symbolizes my life,
and/or my marriage to Susan at the time. Susan stepping out to get something may refer to her
adoption of weed as a treatment for depression a couple of years before I turned 58. The attendant
changes in her character and behavior destabilized our marriage, a disruption from which we were not
yet fully recovered as we approached my 58th birthday. According to the dream the break was
permanent. That Susan was driving symbolizes my sense that I was not in charge of my own life.
After she leaves I still do not accept full control, or responsibility, for what happens next. I am
not able to let her back in, nor am I able to stop what is happening though I do manage to avert a
potentially catastrophic plunge down the hill ahead. At the end of the dream I am alone and
covering new (newly planted) ground but only barely in control of my inexorable progress towards 58.