He went to bed at midnight. By 4:30 in the morning he had woken twice, roughly two hours apart, both times out of dreams about RV life — being on the road, managing resources, the specifics of a life he had not yet begun. The second time, instead of turning over and going back down, rswfire picked up the camera and started recording in the dark.
He opened the way he always opens, with a greeting, and then stated the time and the fact of the waking plainly: bad dreams, twice now, and he wanted to share that before going back to sleep. What followed was not a report of distress but a description of mechanism. He named what he understood to be happening — proximity to a real transition triggering the subconscious to run scenarios, to model encounters, to rehearse the experiences he might have. He described it as one of the ways people learn. He described it as fascinating. He said the thing he had not expected was that this would be part of the crossing at all, and that this was exactly the kind of experience he had thought was worth transmitting to anyone watching someone move from normal life to RV life.
Underneath the dreams sat a number. He was attempting to finance $84,000 — the most he had ever tried to borrow, more than twice the roughly $40,000 he had financed for the first RV in December. He walked through the arithmetic of his own credit out loud: the first loan had gone through easily, no verification, a score around 780 at the time. Recent activity had pulled it down to around 740, including the December RV itself, paid off but still reporting as an open account until the cycle caught up. He named the fallback without flinching from it — if the financing did not come through, he was looking at something twenty years old, and he did not know beyond that what he would do.
The dealership had closed for the day. He had asked them to run the application through the same bank that had financed the first RV, and they had, and he had watched the credit pull register while he was driving home. Somewhere on the other side of that pull there was probably already an answer. He said he thought they likely had it and simply did not know it yet, that no one would know until morning when they got in. The night he was recording in was the interval between the application and the outcome — the whole apparatus stopped, the decision made or unmade in a system he could not query at 4:30 a.m.
He put the pieces together on camera and said the dreams did not surprise him at all. Things had gotten real. His brain was telling him this was crazy, that he was going to be managing propane and fuel and places to stay, continuously, on the road, and that it was a lot — and new, because he had never done it. He stated that it did not bother him, that he loves dreams whether they are good or bad, that he was doing good and still super excited, and that he had fear and anxiety about life on the road and about the financing, both named plainly and both left standing. He called it his reality for that day. He said he expected to know more tomorrow, that he would update when he did, and then he said good night and went back to sleep.