Another dream

Woke up from another dream about my previous career. A photographer and I had raced to Tulsa because of the threat of severe weather. By the time we got there, the storms had already come and gone, leaving nothing but wet streets. It was late evening and starting to get dark, and we were frantically searching for some minor damage, because once you've driven that far for a story, you're expected to get something on the air no matter what.

(Ever seen one of those live reports where the reporter starts out by saying, 'Everything's calm in this community tonight, but it could have been much, much worse'? That's often what happened — the crew drove a long way for nothing, but had to file a story regardless.)

I switched the car radio to a local all-news station, hoping to glean some weather information. The photographer, who was driving, objected at first to losing his music, but decided it was the best thing to do.

At one point the photographer jumped out of the moving car, leaving me to try to steer from the passenger's side. We were in a shopping mall parking lot, and I was driving in a slow counterclockwise loop around the parking lot's perimeter. There was something about the gearshift which confused me. In addition to the safety button on the shifter, there was a second switch which set some sort of international setting. The first selection on the switch was FIN, followed by USA and then some other countries. I was trying to figure out what that was, while the photographer was yelling at me to slow down so he could jump back in.

Then we saw a fireworks show going on somewhere off in the far distance and wondered what was going on. Obviously the weather wasn't all that serious, we reasoned, if they were having a fireworks show. Then we remembered that the Fourth of July was just a few days away, and although it seemed a little too soon for fireworks, that had to be what it was about.

Then we were wandering around inside one of the stores in the mall for just a moment, and then I woke up.