The Men in the Rear-View Mirror

I’ve made a colossal mistake. A total fuck up. Sex. In a car. With a stranger. Not my husband. A stranger. Now, before anybody starts clutching pearls hard enough to achieve nuclear fusion, allow me to clarify. This is a dream. But dream-me doesn’t care about technicalities. Dream-me is an absolute menace. The regret arrives almost instantly. Not afterwards. Not when we’re finished. During. The moment I catch a smell that doesn’t belong to my husband. The moment I feel unfamiliar skin beneath my hands. Different texture. Different warmth. Different energy. Everything is wrong. Wrong in the way a song is wrong when it’s played half a beat off. Wrong in the way somebody else’s house feels wrong when you wake up in it. He pants too heavily. His thrusts are slightly out of sync. His rhythm is so bad it feels less like sex and more like two people unsuccessfully assembling IKEA furniture. And bizarrely… He has a thing for licking ears. My soul nearly launches itself through the sunroof when his wet slug of a tongue enters my ear canal. I freeze. The sensation is so profoundly unpleasant that somewhere, several distant ancestors simultaneously sit upright in alarm. Every survival instinct I possess starts waving red flags. Abort mission. Evacuate immediately. Leave the vehicle. Set fire to the vehicle if necessary. Yet somehow… I don’t. I should have shouted, “Fuck this shit,” opened the door, and rolled dramatically into a hedge. Instead, I let him finish. Dream logic. The most dangerous substance known to mankind. And then comes the guilt. The crushing, immediate guilt. The seediness of it all. The stale smell of sweat and bad decisions. The feeling that my skin has somehow become contaminated. I want to scrub myself with bleach. Industrial bleach. The kind used to sterilise operating theatres and crime scenes. He smiles at me then. And for the first time, I really look at his face. That’s when things become strange. Because it isn’t one face. It’s hundreds. His features ripple like reflections on disturbed water. One moment he’s a man I vaguely recognise. The next he’s someone else entirely. Then another. And another. And another. He’s wearing the wavering faces of every man who has ever fucked me. Not just physically. Life has a thousand ways to fuck a person. Some don’t even require taking your clothes off. But emotionally. Men who broke promises. Men who left. Men who disappointed. Men who taught me things about myself I’d rather not have learned. Men who caused tears, self-loathing, heartbreak. Men who left me standing on pavements feeling small. Watching taillights disappear into the distance while I shrank in their rear-view mirrors. His face keeps changing. A deck of cards shuffled by invisible hands. Every disappointment. Every rejection. Every moment I wasn’t enough. Every moment I merely believed I wasn’t. And then… He’s gone. No awkward goodbye. No exchange of numbers. No promises. One minute I’m the centre of his universe. The answer to every question. The only star in the sky. The next… I’m little more than a crusty stain on the upholstery. The car itself seems embarrassed. The seats avoid eye contact. Even the air freshener appears judgemental. Then I wake up. Thank God. Because no. I do not have a secret life involving random men in car parks. It’s not how I roll. But dream-me? Dream-me is apparently conducting a one-woman campaign to single-handedly destroy my marriage. This isn’t even her first offence. She has a history. An extensive criminal record. Dream-me flirts with extra-marital affairs far more often than feels psychologically healthy. Usually in the backs of cars, actually. Sometimes with serial killers. Because apparently infidelity alone isn’t exciting enough. We need murder potential too. Variety is important. Nothing spices up an erotic encounter quite like wondering whether you’re about to become tomorrow’s documentary. Sometimes it’s retirement-aged work colleagues who somehow produce enough spunk to fill twelve ice cream cones and several medium-sized paddling pools. I wish I were exaggerating. Dreams are disgusting. Nobody talks about this enough. I’ve had dream sex in showers. In swimming pools In seedy sex dungeons. In graveyards. I’ve had dream sex in a Tesco Express car park more times than I care to admit. A sentence I never expected to write. Nor one I’m particularly proud of. The details blur together after a while. Then there are the lucid dreams. The ones where I know exactly what I’m doing. Conjuring handsome strangers out of pure imagination. Writhing around under the duvet throwing dramatic “ooooohs” into the darkness like a haunted sex doll. And naturally… There was that unforgettable night of passion I shared with a Kaftan-wearing Bradley Cooper inside what can only be described as his The Bradley Cooper Lucid Dream Emporium. A prestigious establishment operating somewhere between a spiritual retreat and a low-budget porno. I still maintain he was delighted to see me. But jokes aside. There’s one thing all these dreams have in common. Every single one. The guilt. The shame. The dread. They arrive together. Like an emotional meal deal. One fantasy. One side of self-loathing. One complimentary bottle of existential panic. Supersized for an extra fifty pence. What is that about? Honestly. Why? Is my subconscious just throwing random shades of horny at the wall to see what sticks? Am I sex deprived? In need of a good old-fashioned seeing to? Or is it something deeper? Because the guilt always arrives with remarkable speed. As quickly as the men finish. As quickly as they abandon me. That’s the interesting part. If Freud were here, he’d probably light a cigar and spend six hours blaming my mother. Which, frankly, feels unfair. My mother is a saint. But I do wonder. Because I love my husband more than life itself. He is the centre of my world. My favourite person. My one and only. The person I still want to tell things to first. The person I instinctively look for in a crowded room. And yet if he somehow gained access to the contents of my sleeping brain… Would he be alarmed? Would he be sitting at the kitchen table right now drafting divorce papers? “Reason for separation: Excessive Dream Shagging.” It’s difficult to explain. After all, nobody controls what they dream. At least I don’t think they do. I don’t choose what appears in my exhausted mind at three in the morning. Well… Aside from the lucid dreams. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do. But here’s the thing. When I wake up and think about it properly, I realise something. The guilt isn’t actually attached to the sex. Not really. The sex is just the costume. The guilt arrives because every one of those men leaves. Every single one. Even in dreams. They vanish. Discard me. Forget me. Move on. And perhaps that’s the part my brain keeps returning to. Not the desire. The departure. The act itself is rarely the point. The abandonment is. The rejection is. The strange, hollow feeling of being intensely wanted for a moment… …and then suddenly not needed at all. The familiar feeling of becoming temporarily valuable before becoming invisible again. And perhaps that’s why my husband seldom appears in these dreams. Because he doesn’t belong there. Because my subconscious isn’t trying to test my loyalty. It’s replaying old wounds. Old fears. Old stories I’ve carried for years. Stories my sleeping brain occasionally drags out and insists on rereading at three in the morning. The stranger in the car was never a stranger at all. He was every version of heartbreak wearing a human face. Every unanswered text. Every door that closed. Every person who made me feel chosen right before they made me feel disposable. All stitched together into one slightly sweaty man with questionable ear-related hobbies. And maybe the guilt isn’t about betrayal. Maybe it’s about survival. Maybe it’s the leftover alarm system of someone who spent too long believing love could disappear without warning. A smoke detector still screaming long after the fire has gone out. The funny thing is… By morning, the dream already feels absurd. Not because it wasn’t real. Dreams are real while you’re inside them. Terrifyingly real. But because the ending wasn’t real. Those other men always left. He never has. Which means perhaps the strangest thing about these dreams isn’t the sex. Or the serial killers. Or Bradley Cooper and his Lucid Dream Emporium. It’s that somewhere deep in the basement of my subconscious, there’s still a frightened version of me sitting in the dark. Still waiting for the door to close. Still waiting for the taillights to disappear. Still waiting to become somebody’s afterthought. And every now and then she borrows my sleeping brain. Climbs into a stranger’s car. Recreates the ending she’s convinced is coming. Tries her absolute best to prove herself right. Then morning arrives. And there he is. My husband. Exactly where he was when I fell asleep. Still here. Still choosing me. Still stubbornly refusing to become a ghost. And so far… That frightened little voice has been wrong. Every single time.