I am driving somewhere south of Seattle headed home when suddenly a young woman runs out from the side of the road waving a handmade sign enclosed in a plastic bag. She is short with a round head and stringy brown hair hanging down over the left side of her face, apparently to conceal her crooked mouth and disfigured left eye. She does not speak but instead waves her sign back and forth as she runs up to the car. The sign lists four possible destinations, but the only one I recall is "Brady Loop Road - Redmond". That is not too far out of my way so I slow down to pick her up. When I am unable to brake to a full stop, I turn off onto a short driveway on the left, where despite ice on the pavement, I am able to stop the car.
The driveway leads apparently to the woman's home, and her parents come out to greet me. I think they want to make sure that it is safe for their daughter to ride with me. Her father, a slender man with an angular face, asks if I am sure that I can take her. I tell him that it would be no trouble, explaining I have been hiking in the mountains recently so should have no difficulty getting to Seattle. Suddenly I realize that I am sitting in my wheelchair, not in the car, so the young woman would have to ride on my lap. Given that I am in the wheelchair, it seems utterly impossible for me to make it back home with or without her. Her father realizes that as well and goes into the house to confer with his wife. When he comes back out again I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car, still parked in the driveway, with the young woman on my lap and my arms wrapped around her middle as if she were a little girl.

The meaning of the dream seemed clear when I first woke up from it but less so as I considered it later in the day. The initial setting I associate with Cooper's Corner between Auburn and Enumclaw, a spot I passed almost daily for 20 years, until the year I contracted ALS. I associate the mute and disfigured young woman to whom I commit the remainder of my trip home with ALS, an association reinforced by my progression from driving the car to sitting in a wheelchair and then in the passenger seat with her. The destination which I recall on the young woman's sign is a birdwatching location, though it is not located in Redmond. That might represent my focus on birding as my ALS has progressed. The fact that I refer to it as "my ALS" might be represented by my holding the young woman in my lap as I sit in the car. I live with ALS and go nowhere without it.

The hike in the mountains to which I refer to demonstrate to the young woman's father that I am capable of helping his daughter is actually a reference to an earlier dream the same night: The only time I have been to the Tank Lakes was on a backpacking trip with David back in 2011 +, just over a year prior to my first detectable symptom of ALS. That trip fulfilled a long-held dream of exploring that area. The binoculars case came with the binoculars I bought when I first started birdwatching with Susan almost 30 years earlier. They may represent my marriage, which had begun to suffer significant stress during the year prior to the Tank Lakes trip. That stress may be symbolized by the darkness which appears as though it will prevent me from getting home to Jackson, a symbol of the "true" self to which I would return over the next several years.
It could be that the reference back to the Tank Lakes dream was a way to reassure myself that I would be able to handle the long struggle with ALS; though it will kill me, it also catalyzed my return home.