I’m one of those people who doesn’t usually remember their dreams. In fact, it’s a very rare thing for me to remember a dream I had. Sometimes I might remember some kind of impression, but that’s about it.

This morning, I woke up from a horrible nightmare and I still remember the whole thing. I don’t know how long it took place in real life, but in dream world, it went on and on.

Before I had arthritis plaguing me and had to have a hip replaced, I used to exercise. A lot. I loved it, but my body didn’t. I kinda helped the osteoarthritis along in its breakdown of my joints. At the height of my love of exercise (and when I exercised close to two hours every day), I used to go on fitness trips where I’d go to my favorite exercise video instructors’ studios and work out to special classes.

I was one of the members of the very first Cathe fitness road trip. I went on a couple more after that, but by then they’d grown huge and my body was starting to rebel against my excessive exercise.

Fast forward to today. I do ladies-only self-defense class at my son’s Taekwondo school. The class is a combination of Taekwondo, Hapkido, and other self-defense forms in terms of particular moves or kicks. During class this week, our master (grand master and owner of the school) announced we would be doing Red Man training next week.

Red Man training is where a guy puts on massive amounts of padding (that happens to be red) and tries to attack the student so the student can learn what their fear response truly is and how to work through it. As an aside: most women are able to be abducted by voice alone because they’re so afraid, they freeze and can’t do anything other than go along with the person.

So in my dream, I went on a Cathe fitness road trip, except I went to take pictures of the trip instead of working out at it since I can’t work out at that high level anymore. The location of the trip was in the mountains and I had car trouble. There was sleet and freezing rain and I ended up walking to the location with some other people who had to walk as well. We kept having to take the steep ditch every time a car passed by. For some reason, we were walking with traffic instead of against it.

While I was there, some kind of security/sheriff/law enforcement guy gave a presentation to the ladies on self-defense. He was older and should’ve been reputable. At the end of the day, I needed to either walk back to where my car was located, or I needed to get a ride. The security/law-enforcement guy offered me a ride.

Now, every instinct in my body told me not to get a ride with this guy. My gut was screaming at me to not do it. But I also didn’t think it was safe walking back to where my car was located, especially as late as it was in the day and with the continued bad weather. So, I got a ride with the guy.

And of course, as soon as he got me in his car, he tried making the move on my legs with his grabby hands. I scooted between the seat and the car door (don’t ask me how my brain thought that was even close to possible), sitting on the floor. He kept moving his hand across the seat to reach me and I kept moving his hand away, telling him to leave me alone. I could’ve used my phone to slam his hand and break some bones, but I didn’t want him knowing I had it on my person because I didn’t want him taking it away from me until I could get in a position where I could use it against his nose or temple.

Instead of breaking his hand, I called my husband and hoped that he’d be able to hear what was going on and contact our local authorities to somehow contact the authorities where I was. I still have no clue as to where this was actually supposed to be taking place.

Even though I was sitting on the floor of the car, I was still able to see out the car window. At five-feet-two-and-a-half-inches, there’s no way that could happen. Anyway, I tried telling the guy my car was right there and as he passed it and made no move to turn around and take me to my car, I got quite panicked and tried to give my husband as much info as I could over the phone without the guy knowing what I was doing.

I could picture in my mind my husband grabbing our son, driving to our local police station while listening to what was happening to me and then handing his phone over so the cops could put me on speakerphone and figure out how to help me.

The interesting thing in my mind that I made note of during the nightmare was that the driver dude never said anything while we were in the car. Never. I know the skin on his hand was dry, tanned, and quite wrinkled. He had quite a bit of hair on his hand and lower arm. But he never said a word while he was driving. That was almost as scary as everything else that was going on.

After my panic at passing where my car was parked (it was an older model car, white, with red, blue and some other color racing stripe across the hood, roof of the car, and trunk), and picturing my husband saving me, I woke up.

The things my brain managed to put together:

• Cathe recently held this year’s fitness road trip and I received emails about it
• My Taekwondo master announced we’d be having Red Man training next week
• I’m doing edits on Christmas Curveball, which takes place in the mountains and involves the heroine being stranded at the hero’s house due to freezing rain and sleet
• I recently proofread Stephanie Tyler’s next book, Unbreakable, and it has a scene where the hero is forced to listen to bad stuff happening to the heroine (very powerful scene and omg I love that book – I’ve read it twice and could easily read it again)
• I downloaded the apps Find My Phone and Find My Friends on my mini iPad and thought about the whole GPS thing

Huh. That’s one heck of a crazy mash-up of real life things for my brain to go so nuts on.