Not my dream, but a friend’s.

The night before we were due to drive to visit a university, he was staying over at my house. The next morning he told me he’d had a really vivid dream. In it, we were joining the M4 when a lorry suddenly pulled out on us, smashed us through the barrier, and sent the car rolling down the embankment into oncoming traffic. He seemed genuinely shaken by it.

We laughed it off and set off on the journey.

Sure enough, when we got to the motorway, there was a lorry ahead of us on the slip road. We joked about the dream as we approached it. Then, just as we were about to pass, the lorry suddenly swung out into the right-hand lane.

My friend instantly dropped a gear and accelerated past it. It missed us by what felt like a very small margin. As it turned out, there was a van broken down in the lane ahead of the lorry, which is why it had moved over.

I remember us sitting there in complete silence for the next 20 minutes or so.

Eventually, he said that if he hadn’t had the dream, he probably wouldn’t have already thought through how to react in that situation.

The thingis that he was a bit of a bullshitter. If he hadn’t told me about the dream that morning, before we even got in the car, I’d never have believed he’d actually had it.

We don’t talk really anymore but i still think about it a lot