Train Track Metaphor

So, exams have officially started as of yesterday; I don't have one until tomorrow, owing to the fact that the periods having exams have been EOC classes (and neither my third nor fifth period class is an EOC course).
I think that I'll go ahead and explain a thought that's been stewing within me ever since I had the dream involving my walk on the train tracks in a barren landscape. In the dream, one of my teachers elaborated on these depressing stories from his childhood, and pointed out landmarks in the sea of weeds around us to indicate where his phantoms resided (the example I remember being the collapsed fence which once surrounded a swimming pool where he suffered the torment of his peers). Through this entire walk, however, we all marched along these interminable train tracks which disappeared in a miniscule dot in the distance, the mating of the sky and the earth in the horizon. The place was hung in an eternal veil of twilight, the subtle darkness that begins to cloak the world when the sun is just about to set completely, the hour of the crickets' awakening and barbecue smells.
Well, in any case, I think that the concept of a traveling train is a good one to visualize one's consciousness in relation to Past, Present, and Future. Obviously, in the dream, we were all experiencing my teacher's past; no train traveled on the tracks, and we walked in a place which was not only traveled once before, but was also disheveled and unkempt. There were signs around (like the fence) which led one to believe that the area was certainly inhabited at one point, but was no longer, and for all intents and purposes, the Past was a wasteland - in that one could not walk its road twice and reap different crops from it; one walked it once (or rather rode through it in the train) and traveled back many times alone to view it in the distorted scope of one's memory, which keeps things alive, but only with the connotation and added commentary of the "rememberer."
Though we didn't travel to the future in my dream, I have conjured an image to go along with the rest of the metaphor. Imagine passing like a ghost, the very embodiment of a soul, out beyond the boundaries of your train compartment, out to the distance where the gold fringe of the horizon provokes curious eyes to wonder what might wait beyond. I imagine the tracks splitting in a numerous amount of ways - all to places founded in our imagination upon that skill of ours, insight - which, as Dr. Findeis explained to us, is our ability to predict how to act in completely new experiences, or in this case, merely our ability to predict what these new experiences might be - all places the train might potentially go. But while we are on the train, ours is not the mind of the conductor, who is sitting at the head of the train with his own destination in mind, which may differ from the one that we have predicted. Ahead, our minds dwell in cities, never lingering long enough to establish that our destination is a certainty, wandering from road to road, never certain - and all of the towns are ghost towns themselves, decorated with a thin wisp of bluish haze to indicate the boundaries of our imagination. And imagine, for a moment, a pleasant land of this bluish haze - a paradise of your own creation, a hope or dream for the best - how curious to think that often we are in this paradise when the train, filled now with its zombie bodies transported elsewhere, passes us all on the road chosen of the conductor. And now, not only are we not in the present, but we are also no longer in the potential future - we're in the past which never occured in the first place - in shock, we zoom back to the train rattling through the roads of the present, leaving our fantasies desolate in some corner of our brains.
The train, we have established, is the present. How often are we wary of it, I wonder, the vessel which carries us irrestibly onward? How wary are we of it, between us nostalgic ones and those who dwell on soon-to-be-fruitless fantasies? We wander the halls of the compartments and acknowledge our brothers when we are conscious of our surroundings, waving to them in each open-doored compartment - sometimes, it is as though they shut that compartment door, and those that walk into our lives seem to disappear like a shadow from it once more. But they are always there, the live ones - just sometimes beyond barriers that human cowardice prevents us from transcending. Permanent departure occurs when the train stops and that faceless conductor weaves his way through the zombie crowd and beckons to a certain passenger; "Your stop, Madam," he says, and leads her bewildered from her compartment. We catch a glimpse of her through the window; she is pale as Death himself, walking with the footsteps of the timid beside the tracks, shielding her eyes from the brightness of the gold-fringed horizon. Then we never see her again. Now that I think about it, this dream can be eerily compared with a certain poem of Carl Sandburg's, entitled "Limited"
The computer won't let me copy and paste the poem for my readers' benefit, but I strongly encourage you to follow this link and see what I mean: www.americanpoets.com/poets/carlsandburg/12681.
Since I've rambled so long on this topic, let me finish by saying that my grandmother left for Florida today, and my Aunt Karen and Jeremy left yesterday. It is always so sad when everyone leaves : ( I'm going to join my mom and baby Kalyn out in the living room, where they are watching one of the "Scary Movie" movies.