A Future Train Ride

I’m riding a train somewhere in Europe, reading a book but mostly looking around to admire the scenery. My son is sitting next to me on the right, scrolling through the vast collection of music on his phone. Sometimes he’d just stick one of his earphones into my ear, “Listen to this one.”

I never protest and almost always enjoy his songs as most of them are from the 1980s and 90s. He started doing that when he was a teenager, on our long train and bus rides together, and it is one of the strongest bonds we have to this day. He is 22 and has a girlfriend now and I dread even the thought that one day he will stop sharing his music with me.

We are sitting in the first row right behind the train driver. It’s one of those new trains whose body is made almost entirely out of plexiglass, so we see clearly what is going on in front of us, as well as the driver’s back in a plexiglass swivel chair. It’s a bullet train, but you can still enjoy the fast-moving scenery through its panoramic view.

The train slows down a little as we pass a station platform on the left. I notice a woman in her 30s with a little girl in front of her, holding a gift-wrapped box. The train doesn’t stop, and they start running along the platform. The woman is yelling, “Stop! She needs to give this gift to her grandmother, it’s her Birthday!” They of course have no chance of keeping up with the train, so I shout out to the driver, “Did you forget to stop?”

“Shit!” the driver spits in frustration. He can’t simply stop the train that is speeding up again, not to mention going back.

Up front, I see another train heading right at us, on the same tracks. It’s a slower cargo locomotive, the one you’d see in Thomas the Train Engine cartoons. The driver of that train sticks his head out the window and yells something at our driver. The collision is inevitable.

“Shit!” our driver shouts again and hits the emergency breaks. Our wheels screech, things in our car start flying around and some people scream in pain. We are buckled up, but I feel the pain in my chest from the belt, and my son’s eyes open wide in pain mixed with shock.

The cargo train driver hits the breaks as well. His locomotive tips over and falls on the right side of the tracks, causing a domino derailing effect for the cars behind. They spill lumber all over the place.

“Good thing it’s not gas or chemicals,” I say to my son and my mind goes into estimating how long it would take to clean up the tracks so that they are passable again. Forever, probably.

Our train finally stops, less than a hundred yards away from the derailed train. The locomotive driver gets out through the window, seemingly alright, and runs toward us, yelling at our driver something in Arabic. Our driver yells back at him, also in Arabic. I’ve taken classes in Arabic and from the familiar words and tension in their voices, I can tell they are blaming each other for what happened.

“He is a f*cking immigrant!” I hear someone behind us yelling about our driver.

“I bet he’s illegal, too!” another person shouts.

“No wonder, he can’t even drive this f*cking train!”

The crowd is forming, starting to charge at the driver. Both my son and I get up, trying to calm them down and reason with them.

Our driver swivels around in his chair and yells at them, “I cannot drive??? I’ll show you how I cannot drive!!! Go back to your seats, right now, and buckle up!”

His no-accent command sounds so authoritative everyone goes back to their seats. I hear the belts clicking. We do the same. The driver looks at everyone and says, “Ready? Good, hold on to your seats!”

He swivels back to the dashboard and hits the reverse button. As we pull back to the missed train station, he opens the door and the mother of the girl with the gift box pushes her inside, gives her a kiss and says, “Say Happy Birthday to grandma for me, will you?”

The girl makes herself comfortable in the seat across from us, sets the box on the table between us and says to me, “Happy Birthday, grandma!”

Before I express my surprise (I have no daughters or granddaughters), the driver closes the door and turns the train to the right.

“What are you doing?” I yell at him, “this is not a bus!”

“Just shut up and watch, young lady!” the driver says, giving me a crooked smile.

I’m both offended and flattered (I’m 54) but keep my mouth shut. The futuristic-looking train station main building is to the right of us on a hill, and it has steps there for the passengers to use to get down to lower platforms. The entire architecture looks like a glass Mayan pyramid, with tracks and steps running parallel to the station at the very top. Our tracks are on the lowest level, so we have a way to climb. As our train starts climbing the stairs, I look down through the plexiglass and see that its wheels miraculously mold themselves into a shape that allows them to climb the stairs effortlessly, almost like hugging them. The car is not even shaking.

“Those wheels must have been made of some high-tech resin or something,” I note to my son. He’s in awe as well. The little girl across from us is unimpressed.

Once we get to the top platform, the driver steadies our train on the tracks, turns around and says into the PA system, “Take a 15-minute break, use the bathroom and other facilities at the station. Be back in 15 minutes promptly, if you want to get where you are going on time!”

As people start deboarding the train, I ask the driver, “And what are you going to do?”

“Need to go back and check on the cargo train,” the driver said calmly.

My son and I take our backpacks and carryons (we’ve learned several hard lessons about leaving things on trains and planes). My newly acquired granddaughter asked if she could leave the box on the train. I say yes, grab her hand, and we all get out of the car. Then we watch our train climb the stairs down, still in awe at the technology, while other passengers go into the station building.

***

Now is probably a good time to tell you that I am in a dream. A very lucid dream, where I know I’m dreaming, and everything is hyper-realistic. I can manage these dreams to a certain extent, and can snap out of them at will, but usually let them unfold out of curiosity.

There’s a superstition in my family that you cannot get on the train in your dream, or you will soon die in real life. It’s a bad omen. I don’t know if it’s shared in the larger Russian culture, but my dream-interpreting grandmother was very adamant that boarding a train in a dream equals death in real life.

“Don’t get on the train in your dreams, especially if you see familiar people riding it and you know they are dead in real life. They will try to lure you on the train and if you board it, you’ll die soon after!” my grandmother told a 12-year-old me when I shared a train dream with her.

“What if I am already riding a train in my dream?” I asked her.

“That one is OK, it’s a dream about some new journey in your life and you should notice what is happening, it can give you some clues,” she said.

“And what if I am to board the train with you or mom?” I asked.

“Never do that! Never go on the train, with whoever you are. And if you love them, try to prevent them from going on the train. You may save their life that way,” she said.

That conversation imprinted in my brain forever and that’s probably how I started having the ability to manage my lucid dreams. My late grandmother often appears in them in some way, to help.

***

We go into the train station and I tell my son I need to use the bathroom. The "granddaughter" says she doesn’t need to go and grabs my son’s hand. He says they’ll go buy some candy and we agree to meet on the platform in ten minutes. He behaves as if he knows this girl her entire life.

“Remember, the driver said 15 minutes, so don’t be late!” my overly-cautious-in-travel son tells me.

I go into the bathroom and it’s so filthy I can’t even describe it: garbage everywhere mixed with shards of glass and plastic, smudges of dirt and random piles of poop on the tile floor, covered with toilet paper like little mines. The contrast with everything outside boggles me, it’s like I got into a big public outhouse from the times before people invented running water. I first try to carefully navigate my rolling carryon on the floor but then pick it up and say loudly to myself, like a mantra, “Piles of sh*t in a dream is for money! I need to buy a lottery ticket! This is a LOT of money!”

I find a less filthy stall and clean its toilet seat with cleaning wipes I always have in my backpack. Before I realize it, my OCD cleaning self cleans spotless the entire stall. It’s a dream, remember. And as a train conductor in my real youth, I’m no stranger to cleaning filthy bathrooms quickly, equipped with strong cleaning agents, a face mask and big rubber gloves. Don’t ask me where I got them from in my dream.

I look at my phone and ten minutes have already passed. I run to the platform to meet up with my son and granddaughter. They are not there! I run back to the station and start yelling his name. I don’t even know the little girl’s name. Because of the train derailment, the station now is full of people. They all turn around and look at me like I’m crazy, running around and yelling someone’s name.

I am feeling a panic attack coming, like the one I had when I nearly lost my then 7-year-old son at DisneyWorld. It’s like I’m in a horror show now.

Finally, I see my son’s auburn hair looming over other people. Good thing he is tall now. He rushes to me, with the “granddaughter” and several other people in tow and says, happily smiling, “Look who I’ve found, mom!”

One of these people is my dead uncle-brother, but a much younger version of him, probably in his twenties. He is definitely happy to see me. I look at the others and they are all dead, people I lost in my younger years.

“Where did you find them, son?”

“Here! What a coincidence, right? They say they all know you and have some stories to tell!” he is so excited.

“I’m sure they do,” I mumble and watch other young people I don’t know join our group.

“And who are they?” I ask my son.

“Oh, these are American students on a study abroad tour. Their train is late, so they want to join our ride,” he says as they all nod in agreement.

We move to the platform and see our train, with our Arabic-speaking driver happily smiling at the passengers boarding the train. My uncle-brother and the rest of the dead gang are already on board, waving at us to hurry up.

I slow down as I hear my grandmother’s voice in my head, “This train is not for the living.” My “granddaughter” stops in her tracks, as if she heard my grandmother’s warning. She looks up at me curiously, munching on the Nuts bar my son bought for her. I grab my son’s hand and tell the students to stop.

“But why, mom? They’re waiting for us!! It’ll be so much fun to ride with them!” he points at the dead people.

“Don’t I know it, son! Maybe another time,” I say firmly and ask the American students, “Who’s up for a bus ride???”

They are excited to join us in any mode of transportation, it seems. As the train pulls from the station without us, I will myself out of the dream.

***

I wrote this up because I’m curious what my next European train journey will be, if I ever have a Birthday-gift-giving granddaughter, what kind of filth I will have to clean out (for the benefit of others, nonetheless), and when I finally win a lottery. This dream happened exactly two weeks before my 55th birthday, so it must come true, right? To make it happen, I’ll publish it in the Futurism community.

Thanks for joining this wild ride with me!