In real life, my Mom passed away a week ago last Friday. Last night I dreamed she was still around and relatively healthy, and had gotten herself a Formula 1 Ferrari and was racing it, or at least driving it very fast on racetracks and getting ready to race. I and a few other people were quite surprised about this. She was rushing around from track to track and I could barely keep up. I just wanted to talk to her and see how she was, but by the time I got to one track she was off to another one.
I don't know very much about Formula 1 cars. I assumed that Mom's Ferrari was not a brand-new Formula 1 car and that she was not actually going to race in Formula 1 but in races for Formula 1 cars which were a few years old. How old Mom's Ferrari might have been, I don't know. I saw her driving it on a racetrack just once, and I would guess it was newer than 2000. She drove it very, very fast, broke very, very hard for the corners. The engine screamed and growled, the tires squealed. She was going very, very fast.
I finally caught up with her at her apartment when she took a break between racetracks. Her landlord was being mean to her, trying to get her to move out so that he could rent the apartment to someone else for more than he was legally allowed to charge her. I knew this, but I never learned exactly what the mean treatment was. I wanted to confront the landlord but I was unable to do so because he literally ran way from me and hid. Mom seemed unruffled by whatever it was the landlord was doing. The Ferrari was in a trailer and the trailer was parked in a 6-car garage in Mom's apartment building. There was no sign of any pit crew anywhere throughout the dream. It seemed that Mom was acting as her own mechanic and crew. The garage was mostly empty of cars, but there were a lot of people in it, coming and going and pausing and socializing, as if it were a hotel foyer and not a garage. From some of them I felt an unexpressed hostility, a snobbish awareness of their being in a different social class and looking down on my Mom and me and wishing she would move out of the building. Other people seemed to belong to the same circles as the snobs, but were friendly to us and seemed to dislike the snobs and the landlord and everything they stood for.
I was flabbergasted about the Ferrari, but there seemed no possibility that anyone was going to talk Mom out of doing whatever it was she was doing with it. I wanted to at least make sure that she was eating enough. She looked thin. I found some apple tarts in her freezer. She grabbed one of them out of my hands, microwaved it and ate it, seemed to think that had been a full meal, and went back out to the garage to exercise. Exercise was part of the racing program. Since I was there and it was Mom's exercise time, she and all the other people in the garage expected me to exercise too. So Mom and I both did a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. Mom seemed to be in better shape than I was.
Again, I wasn't sure whether Mom had actually raced in the Ferrari yet, or was just preparing to race, training as a race driver. But every time she drove the Ferrari on a track, whether it was a race or not, she recorded the result with a number which was the product of 6 and a number ending in 7: for example, it might be 102, 6x17. She wrote down each of these numbers with a pencil in a spiral notebook with lined paper. So, she wrote down 42 for one track, 162 for another, and so forth. One time, she broke the rule of multiplying 6 by a number which ends in 7: she wrote down 72 for one racetrack. 72 is 6x12. But that was okay, because the product still ended in 2. I didn't know what the numbers meant. I thought maybe they were the numbers of miles she had driven at each track, but I wasn't sure.
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