On the road again. (Taas teele.)

I don't often have extremely vivid dreams which I also remember upon and after waking up. Bright morning lights (admittedly, quite absent this time of year before 10am) and a few necessary mugs of strong black English tea usually dissolute any traces my odd nighttime journeys might leave on the psyche. It's even rarer for me to remember specific people from these subconscious encounters. That said, I got pulled over for speeding in President Toomas Hendrik Ilves' car yesterday. That'll leave an impression.

My recollection of the dream picks up where I was walking down a street which was slightly raised from the sidewalk level and enclosed by dense greenery. A building with a glass facade came up on the right hand side and Tuuliki informed me that President Ilves was there. Oddly enough, a large German flag hung from the front of the building. A sign perhaps of impending re-Germanization of Estonia? Will Volkswagen or Siemens start buying up investments here as the Baltic Germans re-realize their drive to get their disparate feudal rights back? In any case, Tuuliki thought he might have gone on a 'trip' already (presumably to broker schnitzel imports), but upon peering down the embankment and through the trees, we spotted the Estonian blue-black-and-white faintly stirring in the breeze. Obviously, if both a German and Estonian flag are hung, that means Ilves is in the building. So we went to take a closer look.

I could see through the glass a lofty, darkened room with a single couch in the center facing the right wall with a gaping fireplace. A lone turvamees stared slightly indifferently from inside of the glass door and Ilves looked up as we approached. He beckoned us in as, obviously, we're that cool. As is he. The solitary guard in plain clothes let us brush past and we went to sit next to the President on the couch. My dreams are often filled with oddities and vague details; one of these was the carpeting directly in front of the couch. A long rut was worn into the (light-colored) 1970's urban-apartment sort of shag carpeting that reminds you of the number for Empire (and whether the representative has been cryogenically frozen yet). At one point in the worn-down pacing line, there was a deeper torn up circle of carpet, where Ilves apparently always spun abruptly and sat down during his back-and-forth sessions. I have no idea how I knew or noticed this, but the President sat directly in front of that chasm in the carpeting, so it wasn't a complicated deduction.

We sat around and bantered for a decent amount of time, and then as a result of dream-swish-swash and fogged transition, we were somehow a trio in Ilve's coal-black open-top jeep (which he of course loaned us) out on the open highway in a vast autumn tundra. Regardless of the fact that I was sitting alone in the backseat, I happened to also be the driver of the vehicle. I'm not sure whether it was because I was getting used to driving from the back seat, the confusing factor of a regular steering wheel and pedals in the front, or that I was still acclimating myself with being in a car suddenly opposed to the white three-person sofa in Ilves' dusky office; whatever it was, I quickly became aware that I was speeding. Intuition told me that the speed limit was around 50-70 km/h.. I was bumping at a full 140 at the least. Not that it was an unpleasant experience - opening up Ilves' personal jeep on a road straight and level enough to be in either South Dakota or Northern Finland (difference?) was worth the proximity of pedal to metal.

Being in a perfect dream state did however mean that worries quickly become reality, and as soon as the concepts of 'speeding' and 'law enforcement' came into my head at the same moment in time, I saw flashing lights ahead. While quickly trying to locate the back-seat brake pedal and have my way with it, I spotted a large police SUV - more fire brigade than actual trooper, but authority nonetheless - heading the opposite direction. A large (tundra) median separated the two lanes of traffic, though I was indeed the presumptive target and saw the car slowing at a U-turn lane. While I hoped in the familiar vain that my speed (now reduced to around 50 after locating the weak break) and its apologetic lower velocity might persuade the police to look the other way, I spotted a left-turn lane myself and moved into it.. I'm not going to lie and say that the thought of crossing over and speeding off into the sudden forest across the road didn't pop into my head. That was my only thought at the time. I was driving President Toomas Hendrik Ilves' coal-black open-top jeep, and I'm hoping to still get honorary citizenship from him some day.

Then I woke up.

Edasi, вперёд..