Dream Log: Driver of Tragic Celeb

 I dreamed that a celebrity, no one I recognized from real life, a former Olympic athlete turned occasional actress, had had a severe accident during an attempted acrobatic publicity stunt. She had severe wounds to several abdominal muscles. Doctors told her that it was unlikely that she would heal soon, or that she would ever heal completely. 

She left the hospital against medical advice, stole a big bag of cocaine, and this was when she met me on the street. She said she was in trouble and needed a driver. I didn't recognize her in the dream, although she was very famous. She said she needed help, so I helped her.

 She was being searched for by a lot of people. Law enforcement wanted to arrest her because she was in possession of a large amount of cocaine. A crime organization was looking for her, because it was their cocaine she had stolen. And news media were going crazy, because their "this is a private tragedy and nobody else's business"-button broke decades ago and apparently cannot be repaired.

While we were driving, she asked me to turn on the radio news, and I noticed her taking the bag of cocaine out of her purse and applying cocaine directly to the stitches on her abdomen (I don't know whether this would actually result in pain relief in real life), and that's how I put two and two together and figured out who she was. It wasn't long after that when she asked me to put on some music instead of the news.

She told me that when the cocaine ran out, or when she was about to get caught, whichever came first, she was going to kill herself. "Do you judge me for that?" she asked.

"No," I said. "Because nobody knows exactly what it's like to be anybody else."

 "That's right," she said. "You'd be amazed at how people judge celebrities."

"I've noticed the way a lot of people do it," I said. "Maybe most people. Not me. I also don't watch so-called 'reality' TV. Not that I assume you've been on it."

"Not knowingly," she said. "Not willingly."

"So possibly you're in the background in a couple of shots."

"It's possible," she said, and we laughed.

"I try not to judge people," I said. "But I do try to help them. If I could help you -- if someone could help, somehow, so that things got better, and you didn't want to kill yourself anymore --"

She interrupted me, saying, "You're starting to come close to judging me." We were both quiet for a while.

We came to Fargo, North Dakota, and suddenly, instead of the year 2020, everything was the 1950's: our car, other vehicles, road signs, storefronts, everything. Then I woke up.