Cruising through the streets next to our beautiful archipelago on a hot Finnish summer day with nothing in mind other than the music that was beating and the vapor that was flowing through my lungs and out the window I noticed blinking lights behind me. I put the vape down, turn down the volume from the stereo and look for a good spot to stop the car.
A cop approaches my window and asks me for my driver's license and registration as his eyes seem to look for something inside the car. I pull out my info from the glovebox and hand it over to him as I notice his eyes are still trying to find something else that seems to interest him more than the papers I just handed over. He asks me another question I couldn't really make out, as "license and registration" were the only words I knew in Finnish in that situation so I let him know of my limited language and ask if he could repeat it in Swedish in Swedish. It was not something that amused him, he waves over his partner who was still in the cop car who apparently speaks the language good enough to attempt to converse in it with me.
"Do you know why we stopped you?" he asks as he leans on the roof of my car sticking his head closer to my window which was now all the way down.
"Not really, I wasn't speeding nor driving too slow from what I can recall. Is there anything wrong with my car?
"We noticed a lot of smoke coming out of your car while you were driving and it took you a couple minutes to notice our attempts at getting you to pull over."
"I'm sorry about that, I had the music on way too loud to hear anything" I say knowing they couldn't have been attempting to get me to stop all that long since they usually put the sirens on at the same time as the lights and there was no reason I wouldn't have noticed the lights in my mirror later than when I did.
"How long have you lived in Finland?" the other cop asks which goes through the other cop translated to me.
"Not that long, why?"
"May I inspect that device you have behind the gear stick?" the Swedish speaking officer asks.
I hand it over to him and jokingly tell him it's pretty strong so it might not be a great idea to try it out. He smells it closely and asks me if I have the box of the liquids with me. As I tell him that they're not in the car he asks me to step out of it and follow them to their car.
All of a sudden I'm in the back of the police van on my way to the station with promises of getting answers as to why this was happening there first.
At the station they keep asking me a lot of things, some I don't remember anymore and some I found rather odd. Vaping isn't illegal in Finland nor is the material for it, they can be bought in vaping stores along with the nicotine mixed into the liquids. The only laws as far as I'm aware of is ordering liquids from outside the country or selling them yourself which obviously makes a lot of sense as to why that wouldn't be allowed along with pretty much selling most consumer products without a license.
My answers don't seem to satisfy them and they seem to pretend the vapor I'm vaping is too mysterious to just let me go until they've done more research of it. I get to sit in a cell for a few hours as the non-swedish speaking cop walks past my celldoor now and then taking out a cigarette on his way out to smoke it.
After many hours I finally get a phone call but unsure who to really call to tell them about my situation or who would be able to help out. As I look at my list of phone numbers on my phone I remember an old friend was back in town from Sweden who had become a reporter and had a big following on her socials so I call her up to see if she has time to meet up and maybe advise me on how to move forward. For some reason the police agree on me meeting her outside of the station.
The hour of her arrival arrives but the one annoying cop seems to not let me want to get out. Ten minutes pass, then another ten as he goes in and out of the station. I ask another cop why I'm not being released as I have the person they allowed me to contact waiting for me outside to discuss the matter, eventually he opens the door and asks me to make it quick.
I go out and see her car but with the annoying cop sitting inside.
As I approach her window he keeps looking at me as if I've done something to him or someone close to him. I ask her how she's doing and what's happening right now pointing to the cop sitting next to her. She tells me he's been telling her about what "I've been doing". Flabbergasted as to what that might be I ask her if I could take his spot in the car now to talk about how I landed here and how I can get myself back out.
She's reluctant.
I get that feeling of wanting something important really badky to happen so that I should use any trick in the book I can to make it so. I put my charm I didn't know I had on and start talking to her. Using our past relationship and memories as my weapon, the "will they, won't they" tension we used to have to try and get her to change her mind.
I go full out talkative, desperately even trying to convince her to shoo the officer off as if my life was on the line. I even start speaking "standard swedish" compared to the fenno-swedish I've grown up with knowing she's been living in Sweden the past few years with my only experience coming from Swedish hiphop. At the end I remember she used to smoke for a long time before I did as well and let her know about what an asshole the cop was being flailing a cigarette in front of me knowing I had been in the cell for many hours now without being able to consume any nicotine.
She finally turns her head towards the cop and asks him if that's true. He doesn't deny it and seems to start talking about something else before she interrupts him and asks him to leave the car.
I'm standing there now leaning on her window as relieved as I can be, finally I'll be able to tell what occurred to her without the cop being around and that she believed me. Most likely not due to my desperate act but cause of the unfairness the cops were giving me and wanting to know how I ended up there. She looks quickly back at me and asks me if I have my vape with me before we start the discussion. I tell her they didn't give me back my possessions yet so she looks quickly back at the cop as he closes the door and is about to walk back to the station and asks him if he could leave her a few cigarettes. He looks annoyed at her, possibly knowing they aren't meant for her but not wanting to deny a young lady a cigarette he just gives her the whole pack in a defeated motion and walks off.
The feeling of happiness and relief I experienced at the time was undescribable, I was so excited to finally be able to talk everything through with her in a more calm manner after smoking one or two. Talking about vaping and how it has helped me avoid cigarettes, how big tobacco is fighting to stifle its adoption of helping more smokers get rid of their cravings.
Before I managed to get in the car and start talking I woke up.
I don't usually have these vivid dreams as this one, for most of the time I wasn't aware I was even dreaming which is usually not something that happens to me. I either forget that what I've dreamt or change things up to something more interesting thanks to my experience with lucid dreaming in the past. This one was especially interesting as it combined some of my increased activities in recent times within the dream such as listening to swedish hip hop, something I didn't use to appreciate back when I was living in Finland but do now for some reason. Maybe I'm getting a bit homesick and miss talking the language and some of my friends from there which could also explain the girl friend from the dream I haven't really met in over a decade. Along with me having been a smoker who switched to vaping in the last couple years as I was still living there and some recent documentaries I've watched regarding vaping and smoking cigarettes.
PS! Also not really sure why the cop assumed I had just moved to Finland or was a minority, maybe it could have something to do with most swedish hip-hop artists I've been listening to lately not being swedes. Shout out to one of my favorite rappers I stumbled upon recently, R.I.P. Rozh:
Was a really nice dream all in all and since it's not often I remember that much from them I figured it could make for a nice post in this community I usually don't post in even though most of my content is quite freewriter driven (even though it some times shouldn't be on general announcements or activities we're doing which ends up leading to a lot of points or facts being forgotten to be written down).
Anyway, hope you enjoyed it from an amateur writer and 4th language English speaker. Although now that I think of it, what is it that makes a language you know be a certain number? The order in when you learned it or the rank of how well you think you speak it? If it's the latter it might be overtaking my top Swedish spot soon.
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