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.

Green cake puzzles

I was in a semi-detached 3-level home in which my bedroom was on the third floor, at the back of the house. The room had high ceilings.

I found myself sitting on the floor in a sitting room on the second floor, in front of a large screen, but I wasn't watching it. In front of me was a puzzle with many green shades, but the pieces weren't at all like any traditional puzzle pieces.

I couldn't sort out the puzzle at all. Then, there was a group of people. The people were of all ages and they walked up the stairs to the second floor, and kept walking past the sitting room, filing behind me, silently. I couldn't see where they moved toward, but it seemed the queue went beyond the confines of the home.

As the people filed by, I noticed I wasn't sitting on the floor. I was sitting on an armchair in the same sitting room and still sorting out the puzzle, but it was more difficult because I was sitting too far from the pieces on the floor.

A man, dark shadowed face, tall, and scary, someone I'd never met, came up behind my chair and kissed me. He asked if I had been to California recently, but he knew I hadn't, so he told me to go to his room. It was understood without words that I would know where to find him and that I would have to face more of where the kiss came from. I stayed, frozen, in the armchair.

And then I was on the third floor, in the bedroom, terrified of the man coming to get me and attempt to be with me. And then I woke up.

Compassion

My work involves a lot of death. As an intensive care specialist, I care for people who are at the extremes of physiology, often pulling them back from the very brink of death. Equally often, the battle is a lost one, the body slipping away into another world. So, on a near daily basis, I sit down with grieving families to talk about death. 

No matter how many times I have the same conversation, it is different every time. Lying in the anonymous sterile ICU hooked up to a myriad of machines, it is easy to think that the patient is anyone. But each person has an identity. They are someone's father, someone's son, someone's lover, someone's friend. When the loved ones gather and bring the patient to life with their stories, it is both enriching to the doctor-patient relationship and challenging to the doctor's soul. 

For it is far easier at this point to walk away, to stop at the end of the medical words and leave the family to grieve. "There's nothing more we can do, I'm sorry" may be the easiest words to say at this point.  

But some of us stay. Often it is the nursing staff who sit patiently with tissues and cups of tea, offering condolences and wisdom. But often a doctor will be driven to do the same - to sit in the silence of loss with those who are in deep indescribable pain. 

Why do we do it? 

Compassion - from the Greek words 

con- with 

and 

passion- to suffer. 

So, what is the purpose of suffering with the family? 

I believe it is a human quality to acknowledge the suffering of others as a form of spiritual support. To walk away in the most vulnerable of times may be occupationally acceptable or even expected of doctors. But to face mortality, that of others reflected in our own, takes a great deal of strength and awareness. It is also a drain on our own humanity - to give something of ourselves other than intellectual knowledge is inevitably so.  

Nevertheless, the cycle of life continues. Day after day I sit with dying patients and their families. I watch the emotions evolve all around me, and remark upon the incredible breadth and depth of life. 

One day, I will cease to be and I will no longer feel any of this. But just for now, I want to continue this quest to share some feeling, some compassion with these people. For I am human.

Dream: set 3 crispy chicken

The dream starts in a board room. There are about ten people sitting around a large oval table, all looking very serious in their ridiculously enormous chairs. A powerpoint is in progress and some old man is droning on. I try hard to concentrate but cannot focus on his words.

The old man puts up a table which I try to digest. It is the number of deaths that each surgical team has had in the prior month. I find the numbers quite high – ranging from 50 to 100. I wonder briefly where I must be, for there to be so many surgical deaths. The next slide comes up and my eyes wander down it – it is the number of deaths that each medical team has had, and the numbers are utterly shocking. 17,000? 3,700? Every number has a 7 in it. My mind races to think if there is some epidemic – another Spanish flu? Down the bottom of the slide, the infectious diseases team had 77,000 deaths.

I am so shocked that the dream flicks into the next scene. I’m in a street market, not unlike what I have been seen all over Asia and most recently in Bangkok. The stalls are darkened by their canvas covers, and the air feels stagnant with the smell of dead animals and rotting fruit. The ground is an undescribable murk of grey and my shoes squelch in mysterious puddles. I am looking for a particular stall – and when I find it, a man comes up to me to tell me what the menu is (it appears to be in Thai).

He says that this stall sells pretty much everything now, from fried noodles to iced desserts. But what most people don’t know is that it all started with the fried chicken, and that’s what people in the know always get. I scan the menu and say to the lady, Set 3 Crispy chicken please.

She takes half a chicken from behind the counter and chops it up on a big block fashioned from a tree stump. The sound of the cleaver is surreal as it falls and hits flesh. She gathers the pieces of chicken atop some rice and gives the box to me in a small plastic bag.

Wordlessly, the man starts to lead me away from the stall. People are milling all around me and the stalls are so crowded it is hard to know where the exit is. He brings me to a large house, and opens the gate for me to get in. Inside I am alone, standing in a lush tropical garden. I take my Set 3 Crispy chicken into the kitchen and look for a plate to put it on. The kitchen faces into the garden with glass sliding doors that are fully open.

Soon a nun walks into the garden and pokes her head into the kitchen.

Please, could you help take lunch out of the oven before you start eating?

She has a strange accent that is hard to place – eastern European?

I open the oven door and there is a roasting tray with a chicken and some potatoes around it. The oven is utterly filthy, dripping with black grease. I look for an implement to take the tray out with, an oven glove or something similar – but all I can find is a pair of pink (lotus) coloured fingerless mittens. The tray is hot and I almost drop it, but I manage in the end. I look at my hands, a strange sense of deja vu washing over me.

More nuns are passing through the garden now, followed by some other people dressed in street clothes. Finally a couple of Jewish rabbis stroll in. They all come into the kitchen and start serving themselves from the tray. I’ve lost my Set 3 Crispy chicken somewhere in the process and wonder if I will get any lunch at all.

One of the rabbis pours me a glass of wine. I am confused by the sight of nuns and rabbis eating together in the same room, and also rabbis pouring me wine – aren’t they supposed to be abstinent? The wine is in a tall blue glass – it looks almost translucent in the light and I conclude it must be made from very fine glass.

But the wine tastes utterly horrible and I feel too rude to tip it out. So I go into the garden and take a seat under the canopy of the dense trees. No one follows me and I relish the peace and tranquility the garden brings. I can vaguely hear the chatter of the lunch crowd, but I am all alone. I tip the wine quickly into the ground, and then I wake up.

Dream: a night in Bangkok

(This is the most vivid dream I have had in a little while, the night after I return from Bangkok)

Fragments of the beginning are lost. The dream starts in darkness, the type of deep inkiness that is associated with the time between 2 – 4am. It is much too late to be awake from fun, and much too early for any type of constructiveness. P and I are in a large bed, but there are no distinguishing features of the room in the darkness.

I pick up my phone and see a message from a friend from long, long ago. He sends a screenshot of a conversation he had with someone who is typing in Tamil – the words are lost on me, but he explains in Chinese under the screenshot that he is planning, “at the right time”, to blow up a plane.

I stare at the screen and blink several times. I wake up P and he takes a while to process the news. We discuss why he may have sent this message to me, whether it is some type of joke.

Let’s go for a walk. He says.

It seems insane to go for a walk at this hour, but I am too stunned to object. We dress hastily and head out onto the street.

It is humid outside, the air thick and fragrant with humanity. It occurs to me that we are probably in Bangkok. I look all around at the signs but nothing means anything.

We walk down several streets and several lanes, talking about various things but never addressing the message itself. Eventually, we come back to the corner where we started and P turns to me solemnly. His face is dark in the darkness, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an expression from him before.

That is enough time. He says.

Enough time for what? I ask.

He says nothing, but suddenly I realise that the messages will all have been tracked and that someone out there knows that I know. I shudder with some type fo anxiety and many thoughts cross my mind simultaneously. I do not want to live in fear.

We open the door to the apartment, and inside it is dark and still. We stand in the kitchen and talk for a while. We have our backs to the stove and we face the bedroom door, which is closed. At a natural gap in our conversation, we both see a shadow pass through the door. P grabs my arm just as the door swings open and in the blink of an eye, there is a small Indian man standing in front of us. He seems impossibly short next to P, scrawny as if he was malnourished or addicted to drugs. He points a gun right between my eyes.

My heart is racing and I am utterly speechless. P starts to talk to him, and at the moment when he is determined to shoot, he asks him in the gentlest of voices, so what were you doing when this lovely doctor here was born?

The guy loses focus for a moment and thinks. He starts to stutter something about how he was living on the street, and at the moment I cannot tell just how old he is – was he a streetboy?

Just that flicker of distraction is enough for P to grab the gun from him. I see it from the corner of my eye, but the motion is so rapid it is almost imperceptible.

P points the gun now at the very same spot between his eyes. Without a second of doubt, he pulls the trigger.

The gun lets out a silent click, but it does not discharge.  

It’s a fake. I realise.

The guy starts to laugh, and I wake up.