Dream log October 12, 2010

At the end of a week, on the road stumping for Medicare for all and health care money going to people's health, not profit.

I am at someone's house, in Chico, CA, on a fold out couch.

I dream that I am at my sister's. She has a brain tumor, metastatic breast cancer. In the dream, I have a brain tumor too. She has been treated with radiation, which causes swelling as the tumor cells die. The swelling has caused a seizure so she can't drive.

In the dream, I am trying to leave my sister's as soon as possible. I am hurrying, but trying not to forget anything. I have come to a horrifying realization. My brain tumor has been checked by a doctor. He says it's an old calcified meningioma, not enlarging, fixed, benign, no problem. But in the dream, I realize that I've had a seizure within the last few weeks and really just ignored it. I didn't tell anyone. It didn't even really register with me. And I am supposed to drive to the airport. As I get ready, my hand jerks a couple of times, and I realize that it is a tiny seizure. I should not drive. I should not have been driving.

I am looking for my ex. I know that I need him. I will find him and we will leave together for the airport. I will switch drivers as soon as we are away from the house. He will help me. I find him at last and grab his arm.

I wake up, drenched in horror.

Why my ex? In the dream, I don't want my sister or anyone else to know that I ignored a seizure and drove. Except my ex. It is ok for him to know.

I lie and think about that.

The people that you see in a dream are aspects of yourself. I did not see my sister. I saw my ex.

My dream is correct. My ex is the one person in the world who would just listen, calmly, if I say, "I had a seizure. I've been driving. I haven't gotten treatment. You have to drive now. I am totally horrified that I have driven after having this seizure and that I ignored it. And I didn't even realize that I was doing it! I don't know if I was in denial or I was just so glad the tumor was benign that I stopped thinking! This is horrible!"

And he would just say, "Ok. I'll drive."

He would not say "Oh my God." He would not say, "Don't feel that way." He would not make excuses for me. He would not try to comfort me or talk me out of it or dismiss it. He would just say, "Ok. I'll drive." He would let me have a fit and he would not try to stop me. He has never been bothered a bit when I am in a passion about something. He rather enjoys watching it, not egging it on, but just interested in me being all heated up and working it out. It's a bit alien to him, how I can get worked up over a failure of responsibility or over denial.

I lie there and am still filled with the horror of the dream, but I am glad that I was able to find the part of myself that would help. And how odd.

I want to go back to sleep to heal the dream. I relax with the intention, if I should fall asleep, to continue the dream, to heal it. Intention or hope.

I fall asleep. I dream, I am in my sister's house again. I am alone and much calmer. I have accepted that I drove after the seizure and that I won't do it again and that I could have killed myself or someone else. I look out the window at the California landscape. Palm trees and pomegranate trees and the sun higher in the sky than it is at home at this time of year. The angle of the sunshine is wrong, as if I have traveled through time to earlier in the year.

I am hot, overheated, longing for cool. I see the neighbors. Two, a man and a woman, slipping in to their pool. The pool is the entire back yard. Their dark heads move in the water. I long to go in the water, but I am shy. I don't know them. I look and I realize, the pool is not just their yard. It extends across my sister's back yard too, cool and inviting, with plants in pots and cool plantings around it.

I slip in to the cool water. I do not have to speak to the neighbors I am shy of. It is their pool and my sister's pool. The water cools me and welcomes me and heals me.

I wake up, healed.

Water in dreams is said to represent the collective unconscious. And how well my dream reflected that, with the pool extending from the neighbor's yard and across my sister's too, no walls, no fence. Shared. I invited sleep with the intention and wish, prayer perhaps, to seek healing. I have received a gift. I am thankful, waking, for the collective unconscious and for all water, everywhere, cooling and healing.