I continue to have odd and interesting dreams. This morning I found myself dreaming that I could be terminally ill. My right lung was making a rattling noise as I breathed. I decided to go to a clinic to see a doctor about this. It turned out that one of the doctors running the clinic looked frightfully like the dermatologist that I used to see as a teen. In this case, however, he was no longer a dermatologist; he was a very good diagnostician and who specialized in cancer. I immediately trusted the fact that I was going to his clinic, but, I also began to worry that I had cancer. After an extended period of waiting, I finally got to see a doctor at the clinic and he gave me a test. He said the results would be back in a few days, and, I would know if I had cancer then. In the meanwhile, the rattling in my chest was growing louder and I was feeling the need to confront my sense of mortality.
I awoke from that dream at around 4am without any particular feeling other than the usual disorientation that such awakening entails. I managed to fall asleep again fairly quickly. I managed to dream once again before the alarm went off at 5:30am.
In the second dream I was driving a car along a small, two lane road that was under a lot of construction. Traffic was cut down to one lane and there was supposed to be a "flag man" directing traffic through the open lane. No such person was present and I started driving down the open lane. After barely missing several pieces of heavy construction equipment (under booms, front end loader buckets, etc...), I awoke amidst concerns that the car was on the verge of falling into one of several large, deep holes in the other lane of the road while my lane seemed to be growing ever narrower.
In regard to the "ominous" dream I reported in my last entry, I heard from L. today about an unrelated matter. He's fine.
My working theory about these death and dying-related dreams I've been having is that they deal with death in the aspect of transformation. My upcoming wedding is representing something a profound psychological shift to me. There has always been some part of me that felt that I could return to the Land Of My Birth to live one day... or at least near to it. I feel that my wedding to Fiancee S. is forcing me to largely abandon that thought. At the same time, the contact I have had in these last months with people from the Land Of My Birth about the wedding has reinforced my sense of how much time has elapsed and things have really changed since I was really present back there. I think the fact that graduate school had long breaks allowed me to go back and visit in 2-3 week stretches and re-immerse myself in what was going on there. Visits in recent years have been less frequent and of less duration. This is changing how I think of myself in relation to my friends from my childhood... I shall now more permanently than ever be the "old friend at a distance" than simply the "friend". The wedding (hopefully) being a gathering of these friends represents a bridge between what I felt before, and what I sense will come. Therefore, I dream about friends dying... and about parts of myself dying, but only because of pending transformation.
said drgeek
on 2004-03-08 at 6:26 p.m.
|
The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
|