I am not actually made of gold...

Last night I had a dream wherein I was running along a four-lane highway, ostensibly one of the main roads in my town, at night. There wasn't much traffic, and I saw a break in it, so I crossed from the right shoulder to the left.

A pickup truck was coming over the ridge ahead of me, and at first I thought it was coming in the center oncoming lane to my left, but then it was coming backwards--actually driving backwards--in the lanes to my right. It pulled onto the shoulder where I'd been a moment before--just across the highway from the entrance to a residential area--and stopped. A man and a woman got out. They set a long gun on the roof of the cab. They were laughing.

I was bewildered. What legitimate reason was there for this behavior? It occurred to me to run, but not to pull out my cellphone and call the police.

I broke out of the dream--or took the dream so far into lucidity that I was writing it--at that point, so it basically ended there.

But the thing that gets me is that I started from the standpoint of giving these people the benefit of the doubt. It was as I was analyzing it enough to wake up my brain and stop the flow of images that I realized these people were up to no good. If that had been real, I might have cost the police department response time. (Well, I'm not sure dream-me had a cell phone originally, but awake me was still kicking myself.)

This dream feels like a parable to me. We often see people doing dangerous, foolish things, and try to imagine that it's justified. Maybe it really is malevolent.