I had a dream that I kidnapped my 10-year-old daughter that I had. I don’t know how it started, but it was some sort of mistake/misunderstanding, where instead of admitting the mistake and doing the right thing, I compounded it with making bad choices, and the next thing I knew, I was kidnapping her and if I ever brought her back home, I’d never get to see her again cuz I’d go to jail, so I had to stay on the lam.

I had a car that was like a 1970s muscle car, which allowed me to outrun the police, but it had modern-day gas mileage somehow, so it was easier to afford gas for it. The gas mileage wasn’t even that great, but it was like 22mpg, whereas the real muscle cars from the 70s had like 7mpg.

That analysis of gas mileage was literally a part of my dream, with those exact numbers.

The car was basically this one: It was yellow and had the intake thing that came up from the hood.

Anyway, here are the adventures we had:

We tried to go to a restaurant to eat, but we had no money, so they let us sit and eat corn flakes that we had brought. I resolved to look for odd jobs while we were on the road.

We visited the “Cardiff Castle”. Not the real Cardiff Castle, but in fact an old, fancy tree in Utah that had died of natural causes and its remains had weathered and rotted so that it looked like a cool castle. Actually, it looked like the archaeological remains of a cool castle’s foundation. The way its roots were laid out made it look like roads leading up to the castle. But it was a tourist trap. I guess the nearby community had some Welsh settlers and that’s why they named it “Cardiff Castle”.

When I woke up, I looked up Cardiff Castle on wikipedia to see if there really was a tourist trap like this. The only hit I got was for the real Cardiff Castle – a castle in Cardiff, Wales. I was probably thinking of the Coral Castle.

In another episode, we talked about what roads to take. We had been avoiding the freeway and sticking to the highways and country roads, because we thought we would be harder to detect on those roads. But then we found this area full of farms with private roads. I thought we’d be even less detectable if we went on the private roads. So we started driving on those. But I went to the farmhouse at one of the farms, to ask permission to use their roads, and to see if they had any odd jobs we could do, cuz we were driving constantly and needed money for food and gas. The person at the farmhouse said that we could use the private roads if we really thought that was a good idea, but the private roads connected with some federal park land further up. He said that if we stayed on the main roads, we’d only have to deal with state and county police, but if we took the park roads, we’d also have to deal with park rangers! When he said that, I realized that he knew who we were and that they must’ve been showing our pictures on TV. I decided not to do any odd jobs, and to just drive as fast as we could to get out of there, especially since the next thing that guy was probably gonna do was call the police.

In another episode, we stopped at some sort of watering-hole. It was put by the side of the road as a public service for people who were driving livestock trucks, so that you could spray water into your truck to cool your animals and let them drink.

There were a bunch of italian drivers there, for some reason. One of them thought my daughter was cute (she was), and took her picture. Later, we got an email. He had sent her picture to “Doctor Alford’s Smile Floss”, and they wanted to use her picture on the next box.

I said no, because it seemed like a bad omen, because the “Alford Plea” is where you plead guilty to the crime but say “I’m not actually guilty, I just think I’m gonna lose this case, so I’m making a plea deal.”

I guess my dream thought that “Alford” sounded like an Italian name. That’s the only reason I can think of that my dream would have specified that there were Italians there. But now that I’m awake, Alford seems like a highly English name. I don’t know what I was thinking.

In the final episode, I called her mom (Naomi) so the two of them could talk. The daughter started crying on the phone and said she was scared and wanted to go home. This was a big surprise to me! I had thought she was having a good time!

So I decided to send her home on a bus, even though I knew that meant I’d never get to see her again. I stayed on the lam, though. Forever, as far as I knew.

The end.