Dream Exploration: Falling Asleep While Driving
On one occasion, in real life, as I was driving, I had a micro-sleep and the car drifted towards the median. I woke up in time to correct it. Another time, I changed lanes at 120 kph without realising it. A third time, I had a micro-sleep but the car stayed in its lane1.
One night, just as I was falling asleep, I dreamt that I was driving a car similar to my Ritz. It was a 4-meter-long hatchback. It was night, but the road was clearly visible without any apparent source of artificial light like streetlights or the headlamps of an oncoming car. In fact, it had precisely the right level of illumination for me to see clearly with no safety risk, but with zero glare or eye strain. The lighting was perfectly uniform, with no hotspots or dark areas. The road was a deep blue. I was lost, doubling back to a junction. As I looked back, the path I had travelled was lit up with a bright color similar to how Google Maps shows a path, but in real life. It was in 3D. It was hovering in the air at chest height. It was a foot in diameter. It was emitting a bright saturated color, lighting up its surroundings with a glow that decreased in intensity as you went further away from the guide. By the time you reached the other end of the road, the glow had dissipated. The guide wasn’t solid and didn’t have any internal structure the way a lamp does. Instead, it was an entity of pure light floating above the road, which is way beyond our technology to create2. I had a first-person perspective, but I could also rise above the car and see an overview of the route from a third-person perspective behind the car and maybe 6 floors up3. When I did, the road didn’t exactly the way a real road looks from that height. It also looked like a maze or had some kind of a game- or movie-like feel. It had both a realistic and a fantasy feel, a bit of each.
The glowing guide showed me that I failed to make a turn where I should have. So I doubled back to the junction. In real life, when we double back to a junction, we usually know which way to go. For example, if I missed a left turn, instead going straight, taking a U-turn and ending up back at the junction, I’d make a right turn. But in the dream, I had a sense of which way to go, but then I felt that was the wrong direction. The clarity disappeared in a second, as if someone reached into my brain and deleted the one piece of information I need next. I was able to think less and less clearly by the second. I told myself, “Falling asleep will be dangerous” but I couldn’t control it. I fell asleep at the wheel.
Then, I woke up from the dream startled, and realised that only a few minutes passed after I got into bed. I was falling asleep in the dream at exactly the same time as I was in real life.
These made me realise the importance of safety. I now eat light before a highway drive. And when I had a micro-sleep, I pulled over and jogged for a few minutes.
The fact that I could see the glowing guide only behind me — does it mean that how we got here in life is clear, but what to do next and where we'll end up isn't?
Maybe in the future we'll have emitters embedded in the road side that project a 3D path to guide drivers, but tuned to the specific driver's brain frequency so that only he can see it.
This switching to the God-like view in the dream is a more sophisticated version of pinching to zoom out while navigating in Google Maps, but in 3D, real-time with other vehicles visible, like I'm actually there.
Maybe in the future, drivers will be able to switch to a third-person God-like view to navigate a difficult junction.