There was a point in time when my head was empty of dreams. For months and months I had no dreams, or perhaps had no memory of any of it when I awoke. I felt empty, rather uncreative as I often think of my dreams as fuel to creativity, it is after all, the mind still at work beyond the daily grind. I usually have interesting dreams, fascinating to say the least. Perhaps more likely than not, influenced by films and books, my great anxiety and fears, they often turn to extremely hellish nightmares or fantastical absurdities. I've only started dreaming again recently, but these days I tend to think it's brought on by stress more than films and books, so of course they go to the hellish spectrum of things. I have had more dark dreams these days and have to often force myself awake, telling myself that it simply just isn't true.
Take last night's dream for example. The dream began with visit to a doctor. A pediatrician I imagine as it was Dylan who was being looked at. They convinced us that Dylan needed surgery for some part of his body that I believe doesn't actually exist in the real world; something almost like a livery or kidney, shaped like a kidney, but hanging in Dylan's cavity like that thing hangs in the back of your mouth before it turns into the esophagus. We were looking at this body part of his, not on a film of x-ray or on an ultrasound machine, but somehow, we could see his insides on a monitor, as clear as television. It had to be removed or scraped or some proceedure that seemed extremely vague. My husband didn't like the idea but I thought it best for his well being as the doctor convinced me. The day for surgery arrived. I felt apprehensive, panicked, uncomfortable. But we went forward anyway; to the lobby, through the halls, led by a smiling nurse to a strange operating room, in a strange hospital. The room was rather small, all it fit was the bed, an I.V. pole and a sink on the left wall. It had a mint green cast to it, the bed the walls, the sink were all a faded, pastel mint green. The bed was the usual height but short in length, as if specifically for small children, and the Doctor was in plain clothes, sans white robe or scrubs or the usual garb. She had short mousey blond hair cut into a bob; was around 40-ish. Seemed more like a school teacher. She tried to allay our fears and talked us through the proceedures like a pro. Dylan was on the bed propped up as the bed had been adjusted as if a chaise longue. He was apprehensive at first, then when I reprimanded him, turned alarmingly calm, laughing and seemingly making jokes which was a big surprise because he usually, instinctively hates doctor's offices/rooms in the "real" world. I told him he was such a good boy.
We were told we had to step outside and wait as the surgery was going to be performed and they would just call us if there were complications or when it was finished. Complications? I remember thinking, questioningly. They never went through that part of the story beforehand. At any rate we tried to busy ourselves while waiting for the surgery to be over. As in dreams, time leaps forward, backwards, this way and that in no particular chronological order. I had no sense of time, but it felt like a whole day had been spent. We visited with friends. We had lunch. We talked. Then we finally thought that by this time the surgery had to be over but the hospital hadn't yet called us. We rushed back to the hospital, feeling there was something terribly wrong, straight to his room and as we burst in, we found nothing but an empty bed. I felt ill, anxious, afraid, nauseated all rolled into one. No doctors, nurses or anyone around. No sign of Dylan anywhere and as the tears started rolling down and as the anxiety and fear broke through, I pulled the pillows, the sheets not believing our son was missing or gone. Then I pull up a bloody shirt - the shirt he was wearing right before surgery. The blood had caked and dried to a hard dark stain on the shirt. There was nothing else to indicate what had happened or where they had taken him. I feared the worst and as I bawled my eyes out, reiterating my son's name, we found hundreds of other parents outside, wandering, searching for their missing children. Had the hospital staff eaten them? Had they sent them to South America or sold them for body parts? Where were they? Were they alive? Would we ever find out? Why didn't I know from the beginning that the whole scenario was a little shakey - tiny hospital rooms, unrobed doctors and over-friendly nurses - it wasn't the proper operating room, it wasn't the proper proceedure (what about checking in, signing waiver forms, donning on the old hospital robe, where was the friends and family waiting room)? This is the point in the dream when you are screaming as the fear heightens, and you realize you've made the biggest mistake of your life, and you want to turn around and do it over without the mistake this time, and all at once, trying to shake yourself awake, trying to move a single body part in order to breach the dream and once again regain consciousness of your true reality. I awoke with a fast beating heart, as is usual with these dreams reminiscent of some bad horror film. I lay there and reached out to Dylan, felt for a heartbeat or a breath of reassurance, received it, and just stared at him in the dim, early morning light. All I could think was that he had no chance, simply did not have the ability to say a word, to protest in his fullest capacity before those so-called doctors did what they did. He was simply powerless against evil adults while his parents foolishly left him to their hands. Aye, what a dream.
Later on in the day as I recounted the accounts to both my parents and my husband, they all told me that it played like some movie and perhaps, I had watched one too many. Then, I began to remember the association of surgeries and body parts. September 3rd - I will be undergoing a small surgery to remove some lumps from under my arm. An outpatient, and perhaps done within an hour type of surgery, I will still be drugged up throuh I.V., though half-conscious, and may watch as they cut up my arm pit to remove 3 or 4 pea-sized growths from under my skin. I suppose that's where the idea of surgery, intravenous poles and blood in the dream came from. As for the anatomy, I'm presently reading Barbara Hodgson's The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel, about an art historian and expert in medical illustrations who is on the hunt accross Europe for her missing husband. The book is interestingly illustrated with anatomical diagrams, body parts and the five senses. There is a lot of talk of bones and muscles and flesh; thus conjuring up the look of body parts through a monitor in the dream. I managed to take these explanations as the full culprit for uneasy dreams and dismissed the thought of bad omens. Sometimes your own dreams are freighteningly worse than someone else's twisted tales of horror and shock.
3:49 PM | |
