Dawn - Yes, the 'mind' has a mind of its own. In fact your mind, your personality with all its thoughts, feelings and intentions are all the result of the Life Process that keeps you alive and brought you into being. For instance where would you be if the LP stopped moving your body in breathing and digestion and all the other functions that you are probably completely unaware of?
The Life Process obviously has a mind of its own because it knows ever tiny part of your being - it created you! What it does is often not what you want to do or even be. The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes. Carl Jung adds to our understanding of this. “We should understand that dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of the conscious mind. Meaning and purposefulness are not the prerogatives of the mind; they operate in the whole of living nature."
Your dream shows that your everyday life - the road with ordinary houses each side - is your spiritual journey that is taking you higher. The woman who is your real inner guide and intuition corrects your feeling that what you perceive as a way to keep the maintenance of your inner life within what you felt would not cost you too much, and says that it is to keep the noise down.
I feel that the need to keep the noise down is about the mental noise inside you, as with the following - "I feel pain as I am dragged along and I hear loud banging noises which frighten me, but although they are loud they seem to come from inside my head."
But the dream as a whole shows you are on an upward path without huge obstacles. Please see
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/quick-and-the-dead/Tony