Traffic Light

My Life

I woke up in a sweat.

I had that nightmare again.

I don't know why, but I hate it when nightmares are so close to your real life.

This one frightens me, the scenario is every day, and it is something I do every day without incident so far, but the nightmares stay with me.

What if that happens today?

What will I do?

Can I even do anything?

I am a delivery driver. Each day I have a timed rota, and each day I make my deliveries, almost always on time, though some days there are accidents, hold-ups and mistakes, but I don't have any problems, apart from thinking that one of my nightmares will come true.

You have probably guessed what the causes of my nightmares are. They are the traffic lights.

The Nightmare Of Traffic Lights

Often our lives feed into our dreams, and nightmares are part of the fabric of our nocturnal visits to the realms of Morpheus, and in all these, I am on the road driving, though each time I have a different cargo or payload.

Sometimes I am just doing my normal drive and I come to the traffic lights. I am the first van waiting there and the lights have just gone green, amber, and then red.

I wait.

And wait.

The traffic crossing my road is non-stop, and my light stays red.

This is going to knock out my whole day, and worse still my employers are looking for a reason to sack me, as opposed to make me redundant which would require them to compensate me.

I have bills and rent to pay so I start to worry.

The lights never change,

At 3 am I wake up worried to death and don't dare go back to sleep.

I need to sleep because I need to be alert when I am driving, so have to compensate with caffeine pills to keep me awake.

Another nightmare I have is that I am an ambulance driver and my patient is dying, and in need of urgent hospital treatment. The road I am on is a single-lane one-way road. There is a large delivery van in front of me as the traffic lights go green, amber, and then red.

I turn on the blue lights and siren but we have no room to manoeuvre. There is traffic in front of us and behind us and the road is far too narrow for us to turn around.

The lights stay red.

My patient is dying.

My colleagues are as unable to think of a way out as I. We radio central control saying we need the police to get us through.

The cross-road traffic has no breaks, but they can not see or hear the ambulance.

This is unbearably tense.

The only way out of this is if the traffic lights turn green, and they are stuck on red.

This is not our fault but we will be blamed if the patient dies, they will say we should have taken a different route, but we took what should have been the fastest.

Then I wake up.

It is 3 am.

This is one more nightmare.

Thank god I am not an ambulance driver, but I will not sleep.

Today will be more caffeine pills to keep me going.

This has been going on for weeks.

If I cannot find a way to deal with these nightmares, they will surely kill me.