Rant #2,751: Head Above Water

Last night, I cannot rightfully say “I didn’t get to sleep at all …
 
“No, no, no … .”
 
The “no, no, no” part was correct to describe the sleep that I had, though.
 
I had the most chilling nightmare I have had in a long time last night.
 
It was so bad that after I woke up in a panic, I ran right into the bathroom, and used the facilities even though I didn’t really need to.
 
I guess it kind of calmed me down, because what a terrible dream it was!
 
I hate to even reveal what the dream was, but this way, I will have it on record, and if it ever happens again—or the situation leading up the climax of the dream happens in actual, real life—I will know what to do.
 
Again, I have no idea what time of night this happened, but here goes.
 
My wife and I—my son and daughter, and for that matter, no one else was in the dream—were driving on a highway somewhere, and it started to rain.

I tried to turn on the car's windshield wipers, but and they would not go on.

 
The rain wasn’t too bad, so I told my wife that we could drive on.
 
The rain then let up, and there was a point that we did not need the windshield wipers anymore.
 
But suddenly, the rain picked up at an impressive pace, and without windshield wipers—which I kept on turning on and off to get them to go on, but to no avail—it was becoming impossible to see.
 
I was in the middle lane of the highway, and the force of the rain, and not being able to see anything, made me swerve the car into the right lane, where I totally lost control of the car.
 
The car plunged off the highway into a mass of water underneath it.
 
My wife was screaming as this happened, and we went right into the water.
 
I actually felt myself drowning, dying in the car as water engulfed it all around and made its way into the car.
 
And then I woke up, and woke up in a panic.
 
It took me a millisecond to make sure this wasn’t real, and then I ran into the bathroom.
 
Now, I thought that you weren’t supposed to be able to dream of yourself dying, but this dream put that old wives’ tale to rest, because I definitely dreamed of myself drowning when the water rushed into the car.
 
I thought that if you dreamed about yourself dying, well, you were dead.
 
But evidently, that is not the case.
 
According to the AloDreams.com website (https://alodreams.com/dreams-about-driving-off-a-bridge.html#:~:text=Dream%20Of%20Driving%20Off%20A%20Cliff%20or%20Bridge,to%20deep%20depression%20which%20you%20won%E2%80%99t%20easily%20overcome.), this dream can be explained in several ways, but it all adds up to the same thing:
 
“Dream Of Driving Off A Cliff or Bridge Into Water And Drowning Having this dream where you drive into water and drown is not a good sign. It is a sign that your actions could be the source of a bad emotional state that could lead to deep depression which you won’t easily overcome.”
 
The site breaks it down into nine different interpretations, everything from “A Lot of Stress Activity In Your Life” to “A Major Transition” to “An Unexpected Turn of Events,” and yes, each fits the bill for me.

My wife is actually retiring at the end of this month, and it really is a happy occasion. She has earned her retirement, and the time has finally come.
 
With my wife retiring at the end of this month, we are both losing her health insurance, but she will pretty much dovetail into Social Security and Medicare, as she is turning 65 years of age next month.
 
Me, I am a little younger than her, and I won’t be eligible for Medicare until April of next year, so for roughly six months, I have to find health plans to use as something of a “Band Aid” to be used only when needed.
 
These plans cost money—and a lot of it—and I went through a few weeks of despair at not having anything, but now, I am pretty much set for the next six months, although the plans, quite frankly, really aren’t that good, in particular, the primary care plan, which has deductibles that a dying person could never meet.
 
And my son is going through his own agita, waiting for his Medicare Part B to be approved by Social Security--he gets Social Security Disability--and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, Yes, Christmas is coming too, but it isn’t here yet.
 
Couple all of these things with some other things going on in my life that I won’t get into here, and I have been under a tremendous amount of stress lately … perhaps hence the dream.
 
I don’t want the dream to become reality, so if I am ever driving in the rain and my windshield wipers go—it actually happened to me one time years ago with one of my previous cars, but the rain wasn’t bad and I was able to maneuver and get them fixed at the first chance I had—I will pull over and not drive until the rain is over.
 
I don’t want reality to mirror what dreamed, no how, no way.
 
I’m too young to die, and let me put the brake on all of this utter nonsense that I dreamed about in my head.

Stress does strange things to people, and let me put a big STOP sign on this, right here and right now,