A crocodile is just a crocodile
[in honor of having a dream with lots of crocodiles in it last night-this piece was written for the Bay Area Writing Project Digital Paper a little while ago]
I gave up analyzing my dreams a long time ago. A crocodile is a crocodile, a bear is a bear and a dog is a dog. Starting a waitressing gig, supermarkets, that’s what they are. I barely go into describing these dreams as nightmares as they are milder than that. They are anxiety dreams that feel so real. In a waitressing scenario I always wonder how I will serve food when I’m using my cane. And yep that is another, maybe the most frequent, recurring dream. I lose my cane. Sometimes I’m walking ok without it but then I’m reminded of it and don’t know where to look and where I last had it. The waitressing dreams. More frequent than a teaching dream. I had those closer to the time of the accident but they don’t appear so often now. Except that a few days ago I did dream that I was talking to a fellow early childhood educator about morning meeting and how it can be a tool of white supremacy.
I’m often in bookshops. Sometimes record shops. And cityscapes.
Once when I was in ICU I woke myself out of one “dream” to go into another because I wanted to wake up and have the morphine stopped. It was making me sick. I had no sight at that time but I did get into the first dream, not the dream within the dream but the dream one step away from being awake. I needed to have something for the nasal drip and I had to be shifted off morphine to fentanyl.
I still haven’t found the right word for how my brain functioned in the weeks following the accident. The weeks in which my left eye was so swollen I couldn’t see and the right eye was already dead. I couldn’t speak because of the damage to my face and I had a tracheotomy tube in my throat. They weren’t dreams as I would have them as people were with me in the room. They weren’t hallucinations either. In one I was in the lobby of the Chrysler Building and everyone was in a silent play. I was dressed in an old fashioned black dress lying on my hospital bed. I wanted to go back to my room so I wrote on a white board that I wanted to go back to my room and showed it to my mum and the other two visitors who were there for me. They told me I already was in my room. In life they told me that.
I always wake up groggy. It can take a little while for the dreams to dissipate. The details do but sometimes the feelings follow me into the day.
My brain was spared in the accident and also when my heart stopped. The memories I have of those first two weeks have voices of love and care, and feelings of warm blankets. The only day I forget I was in an induced coma.
Whether the dreams come from medications, or a side effect of ICU, I don’t know. Whether it’s any of these, these dreams are here with me. Cobwebs to brush away as I stretch into my morning. I haven’t seen a crocodile in a long while and there haven’t been any bears or dogs chasing me. On waking I know where my cane is and I know that I haven’t got a waitressing job to negotiate. On waking I know that I’m safe and whole. My dreams don’t follow me into waking life and for that I am grateful.
