29 October dreams

Due to a viral illness, I spent 48 hours sleeping. It was a strange time for me – I read Norwegian Wood again for the nth time, forced myself to eat sporadically, watched the fan turn on the ceiling, listened to my heart pound in the height of fever. And of course, I dreamt.

The first dream

I am at a dinner party with many people. The room is dimly lit, and there are candles on the table. Platters of small nibbles are passed around, and there are lots of snacks to take in. Everything seems impossibly well made, miniscule, perfectly balanced. I feel some vague sense of discomfort.

I look at the clock – it is late! We start discussing how we will get to the airport. Someone asks about getting the bus, and others try to patch together an Uber ride. I get in an Uber with a few people I don’t know, and we speed towards the airport. I cannot recognise where we are at all – nowhere I have ever been, I think.

At the airport, it is impossibly crowded. We push our way through the queues, pleading with others to let us through – are we even in Australia? No Australian airport is ever so crowded. I suddenly realised I’m supposed to be with Helen, but I can’t find her in the crowd. We get to the security screening point and a man waves me through.

I look at the board and I realise I have no idea which flight I’m getting on. Is it the one to Sydney? And which one is Helen getting on? The one to Melbourne? I stare at the board, as if it was going to give me some sort of answer. People keep milling around me, and I wake up.

The second dream

I am in a hotel room. Don’t all hotel rooms look pretty much the same? Non offensive colours, a big bed perfectly made up with the sheets tucked in, a table for your things, a TV tucked away so you can watch it in bed… I have no idea where I am, but on the bed is the little baggie I had put all my Canadian things in when I came back from Toronto.

There’s a stash of cash, maybe a few hundred dollars, a handful of cards, and some other random bits and pieces. It looks very familiar, exactly how I had left it seven months ago in my drawer, but what was it doing in the hotel room here?

My phone is on the bed as well, and the woman on the other end speaks up via speakerphone – Ma’am, you will need to confirm your phone number. It turns out that I am trying to reactivate my BMO account (but why? They were the worst bank ever) and the lady was trying to help me. I stutter through the first few digits.. 6..4...7? But it doesn’t go any further. I try a few times and I cannot remember the rest of the numbers.

Ma’am, you will need to have a cell phone number before we can re-activate your account. She says sternly and slowly, as if I was retarded.

I thank her and hang up. I dig through the bag to see if I can find the sim card – maybe I wrote the number down somewhere? After a while I give up and lie down on the bed. I notice that the ceiling looks familiar – where have I seen it before?

The hotel room strangely has no bathroom, so I head out into the corridor to look for one. The door falls shut silently behind me, and I am in completely still darkness. I cannot see anything, including where the door was just a moment before. Feeling along the wall, I walk along the corridor, strangely not bumping into anything. As I go around a corner, I see a glimpse of light in the distance. Getting closer, I see that it is a stairwell flooded with light. It is a fire escape, the only source of light on this level.

And that is when I realise that I’m on the 15^th floor of Mount Sinai hospital, and the room where I was just now was the call room – renovated from the ex birthing suite with breastfeeding reminder exercise posters on the wall. How could I not have recognised it?

Suddenly, in that flood of light, I realised that I was sick. Not just sick, but dying. I had come to this place to die. With this realisation I woke up.

The third dream

Again, the dream starts in a place I do not recognise. It is someone’s house, and I am there with my dad. I’m not really sure what we are doing there, but I am texting someone on my phone. For a split second, a screen flashes up but before my eyes comprehended what the message was, it is gone.

Someone knocks at the door, and I go to open it. He comes in, a tall giant of a man with impossibly blonde hair. He says he has been sent by the Norwegian government because my Fitbit reports that I haven’t done enough steps today. I protest weakly that I don’t even have a Fitbit – but there it is in the dream, on my left wrist. I press the buttons and the screen is dead. The man says I must address this issue right now, and my dad asks him what we should do.

He draws us closer together and puts his arms around us. There is a sudden lightning flash and my vision goes completely white for a second. When the world recovers we are at my dad’s house, in the living room. We both sit down on the couch whilst the man crouches down on the ground. With his hands he brings some sort of energy alive, and soon a hologram springs up with what looks like a Powerpoint presentation.

We are going to analyse my fitness patterns? I think with horror, then I wake up.