THE WEIRDNESS OF DREAMS

Apparently, other people don’t have these recurrent dreams to which I'm prone. I seem to have themes that appear over and over, psychoanalysts rejoice!

1. Triathlon dreams, even when I have not done a tri for 5 years now. The race is starting and I’m not ready. I have no contact lenses and can’t see, I’ve forgotten my bike, my gear is at home/in a locker/unavailable. I’m swimming madly to catch up, having missed the start. We’re running, but the route is crazy: up many stairs, through a house, on an escalator, on a floating dock. The only fun one was the dream where the swim portion was completed on waterslides!
2. Exam dreams: I’m late for the exam. I can’t find the room (often my high school, or the hospital at McMaster where I did some of my medical training). I didn’t study properly. Or, I studied but they changed the exam subject to something else and now I’m unprepared. My bike has been stolen, I have no transportation. (I last wrote an exam in 1997. Honestly, brain, for God’s sake…let it go.)
3. Performance dreams: figure skating, dancing. I’m in a large group, it’s a show or contest of some kind, and I know none of the steps. No idea of the choreography, so I’m always a beat behind. Sometimes my vision is impaired here as well.
4. Medicine dreams: office or hospitalist. There are many patients to see and I’m way behind. I can’t find them, I keep getting lost or distracted, I think I’m caught up and then realize I’ve missed an entire list of people, or haven’t seen them for days. There’s a maze of obstacles, or the computer isn’t working, or I go to an examination room and it’s someone’s living room behind the hospital door.
   

Themes: Unprepared, running out of time, potential humiliation, potential failure.
Heaven help us all: is that all my brain is capable of?

Plus side: not many nightmares now, unlike childhood when I had many fears and my imagination worked against me. I don’t wake up yelling like my husband, plagued by vague demons and/or spiders.

Maybe what this shows is that I’ve been hard-wired to perfectionism and fear of failure. A circuit that won’t turn off, no matter what I choose to do, even in my sleep. At its core, medicine may seem straightforward (ask any podcaster) but it’s actually really, really difficult. The art, in many ways, is more challenging than the science: translating hard topics into understandable language, putting an illness in the context of a patient’s experience, giving bad news, hearing about negative things all day, many of which you can do nothing about. Many physicians, like me, have been "overachievers" who seek only the best outcomes, in a profession where bad outcomes are inevitable.

I need to get over it, of course. I need to let go of the taxi driver who wanted his daughter to do family medicine, he said, as a way to “make good money and not work that hard.” Whether or not his daughter shared this goal was never discussed.

I’ve thought of many responses I could have given, but sometimes it’s not worth it. Maybe for his daughter, medicine will be easy.
Maybe now that I’m done, thirty years later, I can have more peaceful dreams.