Dream Journal

I’m in a patient’s room in a hospital, on something like the 12th floor. I’m standing at the side of a table. Off to the side in an adjoining room, sitting at a table is Dan. I’m talking to him openly about my health. I just started using Tramadol again a couple days ago after weening off it several months ago. He was telling me some stupid made-up horror stories about it that I was debunking. In the meantime, I had closed my eyes and, while the conversation continued in the hospital room, I was in my kitchen scrounging at the bottom of the countertops on the floor looking for lost pills to refill my bottle. There were just insane amounts of pills down there of every kind with only a few tramadol here and there. Eventually full bottles of things began to appear among the pills all over the floor, and then it was mostly bottles. At one point, I felt a sharp pain on my finger and realized I had pricked my finger on one bottle that had come with a syringe attached to it. That caused me to come back out of the scene and back to the doctor’s office. I’d been continuing the conversation the whole time.

I looked back in the office where Dan was, and he got up and came out to me, but it wasn’t Dan now, but a purple-faced Dr. Esper. Then another, larger man came out of another side office and asked me a question that I didn’t quite hear. I turned to Dr. Esper and said “Your face is purple!” Then I noticed that he had something like a scuba mask on which was pulled up, and he had all this bizarre equipment, like this lighted silver crowbar and these tubes. The other guy had a bunch of weird devices and it was clear they were both preparing to do some sort of procedure on me. I didn’t authorize this! I ran for the door. I had the thought that it would be dramatic if the woman just outside were about to lock me in when I got out and sure enough she turned and started to lock the door right as I burst out. I turned and just about snatched the weird orb-like sunglasses off her face just to spite her, but didn’t because I was aware on some level that she was a thought form.

Walking down the hallway, now, I saw that all the people working there had these sunglasses and thought there must be some kind of harmful light somewhere about. I saw a machine emit a bright blue laser-like flash at one point. This part isn’t clear but I think I went to try to rescue Rebecca. I grabbed a pair of the sunglasses from the faces of two hospital technicians. They barely reacted. I even mentally dared one to turn around, watching closely for a reaction, but she just kept walking without missing a beat. I found Rebecca and then ran to the elevator to take it down. Down where? Back to our bedroom where we were sleeping, of course!

There were a couple technicians in the elevator. The doors were closing and I had this sudden fear — what if someone suddenly burst in?! And of course, somebody does! It’s this really big version of Doctor Dorian from Scrubs, the most non-threatening doctor there is. But he’s about 7 feet tall, has wild salt and pepper hair, and is maniacal and scary. He rushes at me and we fight as the elevator goes down to the bottom.

I end up asleep in my bed, hallucinating wildly. I’m asleep, and it’s in a bedroom that I feel is my own, but it’s not. It’s smaller, has a hallway in a different place, no windows where we have them, and no bathroom. It’s a teenager’s bedroom, but I accept it as ours, and think I’m lying in my own bed. Dr. Dorian is now this spirit in the room. I know I’m dreaming now, that I’m hallucinating. I’m feeling tingles move across part of my face. I’m hearing sounds I know aren’t there. But I’m also hearing sounds that I know are there, like the tap of Isobel’s foot as she shifts her position — but it’s coming from the wrong place — 180 degrees shifted from where I know she is. I know Rebecca is beside me in bed. In reality my head is propped up 6 inches on a stack of pillows but here I feel like I’m lying flat. On this backdrop, I have endless hallucinations. Dorian keeps spooking me. I imagine getting out of bed to write the dream, and then seeing him jump out from the hallway, and then I hear a real blood-curdling scream. I know it’s a hallucination but I wonder if Rebecca can hear it from her dream, and I try to keep calm. I open my eyes a little (the backdrop is the other bedroom) and see Dorian’s face spiral out for a moment in front of me and think, “Ah, I just saw it in my aura! I’ve read about that”. Then the dog jumps up on the bed, crawls over my feet and settles down. Then she lifts up my feet and starts fluffing them like pillows. I wake up enough to say “Rebecca! Rebecca, Hey! Isobel is lifting up and fluffing my feet!” and then Rebecca says “Yeah, she does that sometimes.” And then it occurred to me that as real as that felt, that must also have been a hallucination. I was stunned at the reality of it all. I could see the teenager’s room around me much of the time here, just sitting there, “sleeping”. It was as dark as night, but I could see dim black and white outlines around everything. I imagined another scenario where I was getting up to write this all down and Dorian jumped out and another wicked scream rang out through the night.

Finally I decided this was worth writing down, and I really opened my eyes. There was barely a transition. Only now did I realize that where I was hadn’t been my actual room.

References: Scrubs is a TV show. Isobel is our dog.