Dream Taxis

By now I’ve learned how to recognize some of the patterns. There is always a taxi, and it’s always a little bit different taxi. The color or car model or interior details that I notice let me know I’m in a taxi dream again. The driver is always different, but it’s always the same being. I won’t say it’s a “person,” because there are many different possibilities when outside the flesh-n-bones world. Dreams aren’t populated by people, so “Being” feels most accurate. But, so far, the driver has always appeared in the form of a human. 

Of course, it would be very hard for something like a deer to drive a taxi, so maybe the dream’s scenario requires certain logistical compromises. 

What I’m saying is the slight differences in the dreams indicate a recognizable pattern, a linked series of continuity. The different nuances and details that I notice are where the taxi dreams hint at meanings, or they bring up valuable questions. 

In the dreams, I’m always the passenger and I’m always me. I easily recognize myself. One time I was dressed in a silver business suit. Once as a thick-fingered construction worker, with my sack of heavy steel tools on the taxi floor. Three times I knew I was a researcher from a past era, riding in a future taxi and interviewing the cabby. In those three dreams, the driver of the future took the form of a woman with an accent and a detailed knowledge of poets I’d never heard of. She quoted elaborate lines from poems and a passage from an essay. I remember sitting in the back seat and taking perfect notes, writing them in a small red book. But I forgot the book on top of the cab when I got out at my destination – some large grey factory building. She drove off — back into the future — with my red book fluttering on top of the cab. I don’t know if any of those poets really exist, or at least yet.

I know it’s the same driver in the dream by tiny flamboyances of fashion: a glittering wristwatch, a pair of round eyeglasses designed in the shape of small bronze handcuffs, a hair band made of colorfully tattooed skin, a single finger nail encrusted with tiny ivory angels, etc.

Only one time there was another passenger in the taxi. I don’t remember the driver that time (so maybe it was a deer). The other passenger was a young woman wearing a shimmering blue dress. She sat in the other back seat and teased me to entertain her with improvised poetry, to which she would effortlessly add a line or an elaboration in response. To the degree that I got stuck in planning my next poem or tried to remember a particularly good phrase, she giggled with playful distain. I remember she said, “I understand you want to hold on to these, but this ride only happens now.”

When she said that, the taxi suddenly vanished and I found myself holding my breath at the bottom of a fish tank (but that’s no longer a night taxi dream, so you’ll need to ask me to hear how the tank dream ended).

In my most recent taxi dream, the driver sped wildly through an edgy city that had no street lights. The taxi’s headlights flashed upon objects and situations occupying the streets. I watched as that world appeared and vanished in the dark. A barefoot woman riding a foldable white bicycle. A cluster of dogs tearing something apart, their heads thrashing and their tails all lowered stiffly. A couple in a car going the other way – she looking at he. Another dog’s eyes glowing. A man carefully setting a stack of books on the back of a dark brown sports car. Metal posts jutting up from the sidewalk. Peeling yellow curb paint. A large glass shop window reflecting the taxi back at us – me seeing me sitting in the back of the cab. The taxi driver a man with a withered but fierce face. The taxi’s headlights flashing into our faces like a photo’s snap. A bright red dot of paint stylishly marking the center of the driver’s forehead. To big and misplaced to be an Indian accessory. Some private assertion of beauty or identity. Some birthmark or openly expressed secret. Another dog dashing out of the taxi’s recklass path. The cab’s lights panning across the sides of parked cars and the bodies of people lingering outside a dirty building talking and smoking and who-knows-what.

The wild drive went on and on, turning the city into a swirl of unmappable angles and shifting replacements. Until at one point the city suddenly vanished and the cab’s lights pushed straight out into a neutral void – into a flat expanse of uniform desert for as far as the lights could reach before fading in black distance.

At a certain depth, the night resists being formed into names purposeful for furnishing my mind.