Moral Lessons from the California Asphalt Oracle

Last night I dreamed I was barreling down a California backroad—the kind that snakes between dying orchards and outlet malls—snarled in traffic and pulsing with urgency, though I couldn’t say why. Something inside me whispered that I was late for an imaginary emergency, so I gunned it into the fast lane, sliced off a truck dragging a trailer like it was hauling the wrath of God, and peeled into my driveway like I was fleeing a heist.

The truck followed me to my home.

Out stepped the driver, a bear of a man with forearms like fire hydrants and the moral clarity of an avenging angel. I launched into a lavish, painfully polite apology, spooling out excuses like some Victorian butler who’d backed over the master’s poodle. He was unmoved.

But his girlfriend—sharp-eyed, unimpressed, yet oddly merciful—listened to my desperate opera and, with the authority of a queen mother at a parole hearing, declared my remorse sincere. That seemed to settle it. The brute unclenched. There was no handshake, but the temperature dropped from fury to resignation. A truce forged in awkward contrition.

I woke up chastened, the lesson as clear as a roadside sobriety test: Driving like a maniac and talking like a sycophant isn’t a personality. It’s a pathology. If this dream was a parable from the gods of sleep, then consider me humbled and (momentarily) reformed.