To my waking self almost any trip to almost any destination would be a nightmare. Recounting the trip I made in my dream inevitably makes the experience into a nightmare seemingly inspired by Franz Kafka but in the context of the dream this trip was never worse than unpleasant.
The overall plot was guided by a bus trip to some metropolitan city outside a major urban center (both of which had names lost to my waking mind). Before that, however, I made a stop at the home of a young family. This family might have been based on a real family whom I have really visited when it was younger than it is now but the family in the dream was not exactly that family and the individual family members in the dream were admixtures of the real family members and other people I have known from other settings. The house was a combination of 2 or 3 large, expensive houses with a multi-million dollar riverside mansion. The mother was the person with whom I had a long-term and continuing history while the daughter is the character with whom I interacted most persistently during the dream. The dream people were very nice if only intermittently present but my experience was dominated by a need to find a bed and get some sleep.
I find that I am often sleepy when dreaming. I tend to need to return to bed and recover from the experience.
In the next chapter I found myself alone in a bus station buying a ticket to that destination city which was located on the other side of the central city. (I managed to dream quite a nice map, nicer than can usually be found in this age of mobile screens.) I am pretty sure I bought the ticket but the crowds pushed me through the permeable sides of the bus and into a seat before I was able to pay for the can of Coca Cola and the travel blanket. The ease with which a savvy traveler could have manipulated this situation to avoid payment surprised me; I assumed the station would have been configured to discourage such behavior and instead I had found myself pushed into non-payment with no clear path to get back to the checkout.
I do not think that was especially realistic. It is true that my travel conundrums seem typically to be different from those of most fellow travelers.
As for the bus ride itself I have no memory. This is historically accurate; on real bus trips I have adopted the mental awareness of a napping dog.
Uncharacteristically I got off the bus at one of the rest stops. That is a small intermediate bus station where the driver has time to use the facilities and therefore the passengers can stock up on snacks. There I was surprised by meeting a friend of mine. This is a real friend who in actual reality is a retired professor but in the dream was 20 something and in the company of 3 other friends with no history in real life. (In this he swapped roles with another real person, a recent high school student who had planned a post-graduation vacation with 3 friends at a Crivitz area resort.) As they were not heading to the same city as I -- and as I had no better idea what to say to someone I had not expected to see than I do in actual reality -- and as the bus was already starting to reload our meeting was ephemeral. I was curious, in a detached sort of way, who his friends were but the attempt to find out struck me then and now as more difficult than valuable. So the passengers on my bus settled back into our seats and we were off again.
Finally the bus pulled into the destination terminal, a very large building which opened into a very large department store space embedded in an even larger, multistory, upscale shopping mall in which it would be easy to become thoroughly lost while looking for ... whatever it was I was looking for. The least realistic aspect of my dream vacation is that I did not seek the nearest mall exit after arriving but wandered around as if I were looking for some specific shop (which I was seemingly confident of finding).
In practical terms the terminal building was my destination in that the dream did not continue from there to another location. Now awake I see that as symbolic of so many trips. Evaluated on the basis of where time is invested, where other resources are expended, or what goal is achieved the primary purpose of most bus trips seems to be to ride the bus to a bus terminal from which one intends to ride another bus back home. One can also ride in an equally cramped airplane or in a car which does not even offer the narrow central aisle of those other modes.
These sacrifices of comfort and delayed pleasure only make sense if one is traveling to an experience which justifies the investment. Even in a dream I was not able to imagine a goal sufficient to justify the cost of traveling.
Now, in the late summer sunrise, I am willing to try again. At the worst I will be able to make up for the sleep I have been missing since that first chapter at the young family's mansion. And that is not a bad way to spend an early summer morning.