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At 6:00 A. M., I awoke with this dream:
On Sunday morning, the director of nursing says she is understaffed in her home, nearby, and asks me to volunteer, sight unseen. I disregard my plans and hurriedly put on my new white uniform, white hose, and tie shoes and set out. As I pull open the door of the women’s ward, the stench from urine and bowel almost causes me to retch. Rumpled sheets from iron-frame beds lay in tangled knots on the sticky floor. None of the women have had morning care and shuffle around, some of their gowns unfastened in the back. Listless and uncaring, aides stack trays for lunch. The nurses’ desk is empty. I’m appalled and don’t know what to do.
This dream suggests significant regression in my psyche: the director of nursing manipulates me to help her in her home, despite my spending Sunday mornings in prayer and reflection that better serve my needs.
This lack of decision-making is a behavior pattern that dominated my formative years, one that still surfaces: this time likely provoked by pushing myself to complete the daily routine I set for myself; as if its completion will slow down the diminishment of the pesky symptoms of my terminal illness—the diminishment is happening anyway.
In the dream, the alacrity with which I put on my new white uniform, white hose, and tie shoes suggests an opportunity for which I had been waiting all my life. In reality, that nurse’s uniform duplicates the one I had worn as a seventeen-year-old aide, though a bit snug around the waist, in a fan-cooled hospital.
And the mayhem in the women’s ward reflects the piecemeal handling of the anxiety of my mortality, beneath the surface of my consciousness. Among them circulate many directors of nursing waiting for moments to interject the “shoulds coupled to obsessive thinking and indecision.”
Deeper discernment is needed, and for that I call upon God for proper direction. Time is short. I’ve little time to spend in bedlams.
Around 7 A.M., I awoke with this laughing dream, unlike I ever remember receiving:
Ellen Sheire, a close friend, invited me to join her for a weekend gathering of mixed artists, thinking I needed a change. My tension mounted as we drove through a heavily wooded area to the rustic house, built by the owners.
Games, unusual artworks crafted from materials taken from the environs, some painted in brilliant colors set everyone laughing. Off to myself, I marveled over the originality of the displays, also painfully aware that I longed to slough off my conservative attire, to laugh more, and to somehow become more colorful.
The last morning, I began cleaning up the dining room, littered by the guests, but Ellen stopped me and asked: “Don’t you know that half the fun of giving a party is cleaning up afterwards?”
This dream, rollicking with laughter—my jaws, my sides still aching from the hilarity—taught me to let up on my end-time babble. Everything that lives must die. My close friend and Jungian analyst in real life, Ellen Sheire, who knew me as no other ever did, always provided an antidote for the multiple complexes in which I stumbled and fell. And, here she surfaces in this dream with another antidote: No need to be spun around in grief’s vortex when there’s the option of laughter.
Again, like so many of those Friday morning hours, in her analysis room, I’ve been helped. I’m grateful and pray for fresh courage to laugh down the monstrous catastrophes spawned from fear of the unknown—as if there was no God to bring me home. In the meantime, there’s more psychic excavation to be done.
Around 7:30 A.M., I stirred with this corrective dream:
My anxiety mounted with meaningless background noise as I waited for my masseuse. I looked forward to her soothing touch, especially upon my spine. The door opened. She was ready for me. There, she stood, but drastically altered: her head unevenly shaved, her slit-like eyes trained upon me like a hawk’s, her gap teeth resembled a clown’s, her lanky body covered by a neck-to-floor soiled sheath. She repulsed me.
Within the depths of my psyche lives my drastically altered masseuse, eager to knead her powerful hands within the contours of my body/mind. So unlike her former Feminine self, she repulsed me. Only later did I realize her clever disguise as the Sacred. The dream ended without my taking action.
Given the hectic drift of my ego, it’s no wonder that she revealed her true self. I needed the correction to slow down, especially since daily walks in the air-conditioned YMCA have energized me, a tad. My body is still terminally ill, despite obsessing on more outings with my portable oxygen and mask—Even entertaining the notion of taking the Pfizer vaccine. Such is the meaningless background noise that annoys me like thousands of fleas on holiday.
I no longer need to be out in “the marketplace” as little appeals to me. No need to fudge around the edges of my daily routine that has kept me steadfast for almost two years of hospice palliative care. Certainly, more prayer and rest will help assuage my masseuse’s outrageous behavior. She’s got my attention, that’s for sure.
Heart Whisperings 