Sleeping in

When people ask me about my residency, it is hard to explain. You see, I'm doing research all year, and they gave me a whole month to decide what lab I was going to work in. Even though I chose the lab in the month of July, it is August, and for complicated reasons, I'm still waiting really to begin...which means I get a lot of sleep.

As a teenager, I was a champion sleeper. I could remain asleep for hours and hours, allowing the dreams to play themselves out to their impossible conclusions until I was exhausted of so much rest. Mostly I did this in Spain, where my poor, exasperated grandmother had made our breakfasts with fresh squeezed juice early each morning hoping maybe that day we'd get up. To her credit, she would kind of mock us but never disturbed us. So I slept.

Once I signed on for medicine, I never thought I'd have days like that again. Amazingly, as fate would have it, here I am in San Diego, sleeping eight, nine, ten hours, even. Every morning, I awake when I am good and ready, when the half-waking dream has fully unravelled, and I am aching to stretch. Even Mishka, who used to nose me in the early morning, is doing it. It makes for some crazy dreams.

For instance, this morning I had a very rational dream whereby I was going to get on a plane from Europe to return home, but first, I must become a chicken and be boiled in a pot for soup. I was nervous about this. Geoff had been through the same ordeal, and told me "Yes, it does hurt at first as the temperature rises, but then the adrenaline kicks in and you hardly feel the pain." I was wondering whether I should ask to be plunged in head first. Of course, the fact that I would become this chicken soup did not interfere with my travel plans the next day. That's the lovely thing about dreams: it can all coexist.

Yesterday, I awoke having dreamt about the death - or non-death- of a 67-year-old black woman, a close friend in the dream. I was visiting her in the hospital because she had pneumonia, and the doctors had decided it was time for her to go home. She had decided it was time for her to die, so she told her family she wasn't going to make it out of the hospital. They needed to prepare themselves, because the end was near. And boy did they prepare...even while she still lived and breathed, they made the funeral arrangements for the next day, including a viewing in the same hospital bed. When the next day arrived, so did all of the preparations - the flowers, the beautician who puts make-up on the deceased, platters of food and bowls of punch. My friend lay very still while all of this went on around her and while she was made to look "just as she had in life" by the miraculous talent of the beautician to the dead. After everyone left, Geoff and I were the only ones who remained, and she sat up. I awoke as we were planning on taking her home with us.

So, if anyone can decipher these dreams, please let me know and I'll let you have a crack at my dream about the rice fields and the flying carp that I hijacked to the moon....