Last Christmas, I did not wake up to the toasty aroma of mulling cider or the sound of youngsters rummaging beneath a tree. Instead I found myself in bed, slicked with sweat and flooding with relief. Moments earlier, I had been steering an SUV packed with my children and their friends. I was driving them along a bridge that suddenly jutted straight up into the sky. Just as we were all falling into a bottomless body of water, I startled awake.
“Driving is a very common theme in anxiety dreams,” Susan Kolod, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York, tells me. She lumps such nightmares together with dreams of flying or learning at the last minute that you have a test. But I love air travel and I don’t mind tests. It’s the crippling fear of driving that gets me.
