car – DailyNightmare

(Michiganian, 30’s) I’m at my old job, and my co-worker and I are driving somewhere in her car. She’s always pretty nervous and anxious, but today she’s even more nervous than usual. I wonder if someone said something that freaked her out? Or maybe she’s just nervous that I am in the car with her. I have no idea where we’re going.

It’s winter, the roads are a little snowy. We drive over a bridge. Are we crossing a river? a lake? I don’t know. The bridge is very low, very close to the water, and it is very narrow, very much like a pier, actually.

She drives the car off the pier/road into the icy lake, and the car crashes through the ice into the frigid waters beneath. She’s hit her head on the steering wheel, she’s lost consciousness.

I suddenly remember an episode of Mythbusters where they talked about what to do if you are in a sinking car. The water pressure on the outside of the car makes it very difficult to open the doors and get out. So you have to open the windows (ideally before the car has sunk under the waters surface), and let the car fill with water. The pressure equalizes, and you can open the door and swim out. They did their mythbusting in a swimming pool in California, not an icy Michigan lake. I’m not excited about sitting in a car placidly as it fills with icy water, but that may be my only chance to survive if i don’t die of hypothermia first. I try to open the window. The car has power windows, and the system must have shorted out because when I press the button nothing happens.

I was doing this scavenger hunt with a couple friends, though the clues seemed particularly demented and sick. The whole plot of the scavenger hunt was that we were looking for a child that had been kidnapped by a serial killer which even inside the dream seemed a little tasteless as a premise for a scavenger hunt. There were ransom notes written in crayon in a child’s hand that we had to decipher, etc.

There were three of us on our team. We each drove our own cars for some reason which seemed stupid to me because that just meant we could get lost. My car was the strangest thing but in the dream, it was normal. The car came in two parts, the front half had the motor and the steering wheel and foot pedals, and the back half started with the front seat. The way it worked was that the driver would get in, lift his feet and grab the steering wheel and pull until the two halves clicked together. We were in a hurry, I guess, because when I tried to fasten my car together, it didn’t quite click. There was a wide gap between the sections. When I got on the expressway, snow started to blow inside the car, mounds of snow that drifted up on the dashboard making it difficult to see. I turned on the heater to melt it which helped a little. Then I realized that the car really was not fastened together at all, that if I let go of the steering wheel the motored part would shoot off down the road out of control and the passenger section would smash into the car behind me. I drove along trying to keep up with the others because I was in an unfamiliar town but eventually I got lost and had to maneuver the car into a parking structure.