Early morning metaphysics

I was driving back from dropping my daughter off at school at 7AM and I saw there was traffic on the main thoroughfare, City Avenue. There is seldom any traffic at 7AM, so I was surprised. I then saw a car with its flashers on in the right lane blocking the road, so the traffic made sense. I don't normally go on City Avenue anyway, but rather use a parallel road closer to my house.

As I head up that road and approach a traffic light, I see a long line of cars waiting. My initial thought is, why are there so many cars here? Then my exact thought was, "Oh they're just from City Avenue, they're not really here."

Because the cars clearly were here, this made me wonder, from a philosophical point of view, whether the people who were on the road as a detour existed in a different plane of reality from people like me who were on the road because it's my usual road. I would tend to think that the answer is yes. Whatever the physical manifestations, the people in the detouring cars were operating on a different level of consciousness than I, because all they were thinking about was how and when would they get back to City Avenue. They were, in a certain sense, not really there.

It was 7 AM and I was sleepy, so I began to think about whether this was true in a broader sense. If I'm not really thinking about where I'm going but instead just going along a familiar path, was I really there during the part I can't remember when I've arrived? Fortunately, I was soon home. Philosophers must have very strange lives if this is the way they think all the time.