Down in Massachusetts, I buy, or maybe just rent, a red sports car. It costs me $350 a day. I drive it back north as far as Glen and meet Sarah and Roger in a covered area with a dirt floor reminiscent of the basement of the barn at Jackson. They are aware that I have a new car but they do not notice when I arrange to return it so they drive away without giving me a ride the last few miles up to the house. As I am walking out of the barn a young man with blond hair drives by me in a Land Rover-type vehicle. I ask him if he would do me a favor and drive me up to the house, explaining that it will only be about five minutes out of his way. He agrees to do that and I climb into the passenger seat of his car.

I try to explain to him why I need his help. "I had a red Camaro", I begin, calling my sportscar a Camaro thinking that would make my story easier to understand, even though the sportscar probably wasn't really a Camaro. "Actually I bought a red Camaro and drove it up here", I elaborate, and then I blurt out "God told me to go down to Massachusetts and buy it", wondering as I said it why I told him that because I am not even a Christian. "The car was flawed", I explain, but as I say that I cannot recall at first what was wrong with the car, then I remember the problem. I used to race my old car and I even won a little prize money but the new sports car will put me in a more competitive class so I no longer will be able to win anything. As I am remembering this, I realize that I am actually recounting a dream, in fact the first part of the same dream that I am still dreaming, and I wake up.

Beginning with associations: In thinking of a red sportscar, my ex-wife Susan comes to mind, an association reinforced by God telling me to buy it. One of the most significant things God told me to do was to marry Susan. The blond man reminds me of a customer at Plum Bistro the other day where Darchelle and I had lunch together after the ALS clinic. The Land Rover reminds me of Africa where Darchelle grew up. Both the barn where I returned the car and the house in Jackson to which I am headed are references to the home where I grew up, which in other dreams has often represented a state of being in which I am true to myself as opposed to attempting to meet someone else's expectations of me.

Driving a car in my dreams generally represents agency +, taking an active and informed role in managing my life. In this dream I exercise agency in both acquiring and disposing of the sportscar but in looking back within the dream, I assign responsibility to God for my choice to buy the car. Looking back at my life, I now understand that adopting God into my life was my own decision, made in my own agency. In the dream I bought the sports car, but there was a problem with it. The problem was that in the sports car, in order to win a race a higher level of performance was required of me. That neatly symbolizes the basic problem I had with God: I wasn't good enough; I didn't love my wife enough and I didn't love God enough. Or so I believed. The real problem was not that my performance was inadequate, but rather that I assigned responsibility to God for my own critical view of my performance, and having relinquished that responsibility for my view of myself, I could not change it. That was a costly decision, as implied by the $350 a day price of the car.

Returning the car was my decision as well, one made with a more informed view of myself as implied in the dream by my proximity to my childhood home in Jackson. Oddly enough, I do not drive those last few miles to home. I cannot get there by myself, nor can I catch a ride with Sarah. It has only been with Darchelle, symbolized by the blonde man and the Land Rover, that I have been able to be fully myself. That I am in the passenger's seat in the journey symbolizes, I believe, not a lack of agency but rather the ongoing choice to share that journey through our love together.