A couple of weeks ago I dreamt about tires. Car tires. Specifically the tires on my car. Not that my car is a dream car and even if so, I’ve never had fantasies about any particular kind of tire since they all basically look alike and do the same things albeit some do these things better than others. This was about my tires being stolen…not once or twice, but three times. I kept replacing them and they kept getting stolen. Scene shift and I suddenly find myself in the company of two despicable people I worked with years ago. They were caught lying and stealing money from me as well as other former coworkers and were always miserable and made derogatory comments about everything. We were sitting around their kitchen having a cordial conversation while I ruminated whether they were behind my missing tires. Vivid and weird.

And then I woke up. Without an answer despite my obvious inclination toward believing they had something to do with it.

Thinking this dream flow to be odd but there must be some subliminal if not overt meaning, a random dream analysis site yielded much about the meaning of tires, none encouraging:

  To see tires in your dream suggest that you are dwelling too much in the past and need to move on toward the future. It also refers to your emotional health and your ability to bounce back from adversity. You are able to carry yourself from one situation to another with confidence.

To see or dream that you have a flat tire indicates that you are feeling emotionally drained and weary. Your goals are temporarily hindered and as a result, you are unable to progress any further.

To dream that the tires are missing or stolen from your car indicates that you are being prevented from achieving your goals. Some current issue that you are experiencing is not allowing you to move forward. 

To dream that your tires have no more tread suggests that you are unable to get any traction toward achieving your goals.

The one about missing or stolen startled me in its specificity, but three times to make fucking sure the point was made. And the other tangential interpretations were eerily applicable to my state of mind as well.

But dreams, no matter how real, are just that, so I filed it away.

Then the other night there was another one. I was desperately running from something as fast as I could, but rapidly losing ground and about to be pounced on by…. a dinosaur. Not a cute little velociraptor or something similar, but a big old fucking lumbering brontosaurus, surprising since I didn’t think they could move that fast, not taking into account I was probably not moving as fast as I thought I was. Just as it went airborne and about to land on me I awoke in a fit with my heart racing. I thought I screamed but that must have been in the dream as my wife was asleep right next to me. My sleep was done for the night and I was exhausted and jittery.

Dinosaurs had to mean something, so I again hit the dream site and found these:

 If a dinosaur appears in your dream, it indicates that your attitude about something is outdated and that you may need to change your old ways of thinking.

If you are being chased by a dinosaur in a dream, it means you are afraid that you are no longer needed, or it could indicate that old issues may be coming back to haunt you.

    Some of the concepts associated with the dream dinosaur include hanging on to rigid ideas that are no longer useful, the need to let go of the past, that you are confronting something that may be too big for you to handle alone, and something in your life that is just no longer relevant.

A dream of a dinosaur could also indicate that you or someone you know is extremely unwilling to change.

The concept of the dinosaur was weird enough, and the chase stuff was again a direct hit. And to have it executed by a bronto to make fucking sure I got the point. Any other dino might have just pecked and maybe ripped me up a bit (if not totally to pieces), but the bronto would leave no doubt. 

But the correlation was clear.

Time passing, stubbornly clinging to comfortable routines and methodologies with no desire to evolve in certain areas of my life, including my career, with disinterest and disdain yielding that behavior. This is not something I’d been unaware of before these dreams as I’m self-aware if nothing else and have been hanging on to a barbed-wire thread of continuity for fear of change and the unknown. The “Devil You Know…” is troubling and difficult to shake.

And augmenting this is the recent rash of (mostly older) people I’ve known for many years suddenly coming out of the woodwork, persistently pursuing me for assistance in their careers, with little understanding of the difficulties I’ve been encountering in keeping my own career (and head) together. So who’s really the dinosaur????  

As I mull my fate, I await the third part to this mini-series which I hope will provide further insight and maybe impetus as succinctly as these two have provided food for thought. Tires and dinosaurs….not exactly near the top of an even moderately deranged “Things That Go Together” Jeopardy clue. Nor in any normal sentence composition exercise but might make sense in a Flintstones episode with Barney and Fred desperately trying to escape from some creature while furiously foot-pedaling and going nowhere. I’m assuming the third one will be really something, and I’m hoping when it comes it either finishes me off or provides some guidance.

My dream analyzer awaits.