I have this recurring dream in which the brakes in my car give out. The shudder these dreams share is that moment when I’m pressing down but the car careens.
\nI’ve had this dream in various forms for probably twenty years or so. Not too often — every couple of months I’d guess. I had a version of it last night as one of my last late-dawn eye-flitters. The thing that struck me, as I yawned myself into the day, is that we’re hardwired for metaphor.
\nOur brains could operate in a much more literal fashion. We could fall asleep and a fast-talking phantom self could give us an eight-hour lecture on exactly what it is we hope for and what we fear. But instead we close our eyes and we generate these little poems for ourselves.
\nIn my case, my brain seems to have found a metaphor it likes and it’s sticking with it. I suspect that the brakes meant one thing when I was twenty and they mean something a little different now that I’m two times twenty. But the image persists. Or maybe it’s been the same mortality song all along: “hey, wait — stop time!” And wouldn’t that be nice?
\nThat sensation of soft brakes is so real, I find myself wondering if I ever owned a car that had this problem. Was there something wrong with the brakes on that strawberry-scented Chevy Impala I drove as a teenager? Or the gold Accord that carried me from New Jersey to the West Coast?
\nI don’t think so. These aren’t real brakes, after all. Just a poem I tell myself at night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have this recurring dream in which the brakes in my car give out. The shudder these dreams share is that moment when I’m pressing down but the car careens. I’ve had this dream in various forms for probably twenty years or so. Not too often — every couple of months I’d guess. I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-and-also-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}