I’m sitting in the passenger seat of an ambulance that is travelling down a dark road. There are strong winds and rain, and the road is winding along a lake. I’m not sure who is driving, and I’m a bit puzzled as to why I’m there as I haven’t worked as a paramedic in many years, and no longer hold a license. This becomes secondary as a figure appears in our headlights ahead. It is a man standing in our lane on the road. He stands motionless despite the storm around him. As we draw nearer, I realize I know the man. He is a well liked colleague from my current job.

I ask my partner to stop to see why my colleague is standing there, as he seemed to be staring intently at nothing. We pull up beside him. At first he doesn’t seem to notice we are there, I begin to roll the window down to call out to him. He slowly turns to look at me, and as he does his face morphs from his usually soft friendly expression, into an angry, contorted face. His usually shaved hair starts growing wildly, and by the time he crashes against my window (the one that that I’m now frantically trying to roll back up) he is unrecognizable. My partner accelerates away, and we leave him standing on the road.

We arrive back at the ambulance station. It’s a bit confusing, as it is laid out in densely packed cubicles rather than the ambulance bays and dayroom I was accustomed to in the past.  As we make our way down the narrow hallway between cubicles,  people congratulate me on rejoining the crew. This puzzles me as I have no license, and I can’t really recall why I was in the ambulance to begin with. Everytime I think about this, I’m reminded that I should probably tell someone about my colleague who we left standing on the road in a somewhat altered state.

As I pull my thoughts together about that, someone else approaches and congratulates me on my new managerial job. I try to ascertain from them what the new job entails, and can it be performed without an active license. I learn nothing new. This persists, encounter after encounter, until I finally wake up.