Last night I dreamed that I was trapped in some asbestos-contaminated building's crawl space. But it wasn't just me -- there were others in there as well. A smooth concrete walkway was just to my left, and if I could get to it, I reasoned, there would be a less-likely chance that I would be inhaling the dust all around me. Suddenly, something shifted, and I was dragging myself through the dust to an opening, and I was out, covered in crumbling dirt. There were people (EMTs, police, fire fighters) waiting for me.
When I emerged, it was clear that I needed to be taken to the hospital right away. In the ambulance on the way to the emergency room, I was asked if I had swallowed any of the dust or gotten any in my mouth. The answer was yes. Lots.
In the emergency room, I rested on a cot, hooked to some tubes. Every once in a while a doctor came by and gave me a shot of morphine. She was a gruff doctor, uncommunicative, and her needle sticks were surprising and painful. She's giving me way too many, I thought. Soon enough the doctor told me that it took at least three times for the drug to kick in. As she injected me a third time, I felt a complete and total calm wash over me, and a profound nausea that kept me from going under completely.
As I nodded off in this sleepy dream-within-a-dream world, I was given a battery of tests to check the extent of poisoning. When I finally came to, I was told that, while I had a low toxicity level of asbestos, it was a good thing I showed up to the hospital because it turned out that I had to have a portion of my spine removed. In an x-ray, the doctor showed me where the top knot of my spine was freakishly huge and painfully jutting out of my back. The only option was surgery, I was told, and that would mean not only removing the vertebrae, but the surgeons would have to drill in through my skull, down past my brain, and pull the spinal knot up from there. Once the bone was removed, I was told, I would experience a pain-free life, since the overgrown top of my spinal column had been, for years, exerting an extreme pressure on the alignment of my entire skeleton that was causing me pain so severe, but so normal, that I could no longer detect it.
This dream was gone in an instant. I woke up this morning thinking about the work I had to prepare for today, and have been focused since. Just right now, as I was about to leave the office, the dream came up, vivid and baffling, in precise detail.
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i just had a dream, last night, full of all these very caddy women, and a man who looked like one of the guys in my inprint class. they all said things like: "you're not going to get anywhere if you talk to people like HER!" or "oh, that'd be a real career killer."
i was going to some dinner at a conference with them, and while i was trying to figure out if the guy was also horrible, he decided to come onto me by licking the inside of my elbow -- you know, not the elbow side, but the other. and i was thinking: can't he see my ring? doesn't he know i'm married? it was totally gross.
and all the women had salon hair. super immaculate, like they'd all just had haircuts.
i have no idea where this dream came from.
your dream sounds to me like my fear of port'o'potties...up until the spinal trouble part. i don't know about that.
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