Dream: The Wrong Heart Pill LUCID ND

Dream 20021002, 7:00 AM:

I’m at a hospital. I know that I have to get medicine, and I’m waiting in line at a nurse’s counter. It looks more like a help desk, or a regular station, than a medication counter. It shifts between a window desk, and an open desk.

When I get to the counter, the woman behind it hands me the wrong medicine. She gives me a huge pill cup full of translucent gelatin capsules; they look like Vitamin E. I explain to her that this isn’t my medicine, I take a half of a heart pill every day, and they have obviously gotten it mixed up with someone else’s. She acts like I must be mistaken. I begin to explain more loudly, and she looks it up, and gives me a different cup. This one has a half-pill in it, but it’s a translucent silvery color, like a glass button, and it has half of a Valentine heart marked on it in white. I think it’s the left half. I start explaining to the nurse, and everyone standing around, that medication has a certain legally described appearance, and this isn’t my medicine, and I don’t want to take it in case I could have a bad reaction to whatever it is. I am getting very loud and sarcastic. I lean up toward her face, and say, “Can I see the real nurse?” She makes a ticked-off face and rolls her eyes. I start shoving stuff off her counter onto the floor. I’m throwing a huge screaming fit, and nobody stops me; I think they’re not doing anything because they know they messed up. Then, I walk into the next room, and see the nurses sitting together on a couch chatting. I tell them that somebody tried to give me the wrong pill, but they don’t even pay attention.

Then, without a scene between that I can remember, I’m recounting the entire scenario to someone. I don’t remember who. We are walking through the same hallway and I’m telling him (her?) about all the yelling, what the wrong pills looked like, why I couldn’t take the wrong pill, etc. I demonstrate how I knocked the stuff off the cabinet, and yell at the nurses as I’m explaining. I feel outraged, but also a little satisfied from getting to yell about it.

I walk into a room, and find the nurses and the doctors are all gathered together watching a video on a large TV screen. I watch for a while, it’s close to the end of the video, and the guy is explaining how to phrase things to avoid liability issues. He is demonstrating how to make a phone message so that it won’t cause any problem. He talks for a little while, then he says that you need a 3 to five second “shine” at the end – he demonstrates this by babbling incoherently, as if he were trying to soothe a cranky baby. Ba-ba goo-goo type stuff, but in a conciliatory tone. As he’s explaining this, the screen shows a trail of flashing green and orange lights that remind me of rope lights (ND lights). Without any perceptible movement, the meeting is now outside in a parking lot, with lots of bright blue sky with white puffy clouds. The view is toward a downtown, but not any location I know. The head nurse is now giving the talk, and where the screen was, is now chain link fence. I walk up to her and start in, explaining that I should have known that they’d all be here – not that I was told about this meeting or anything, but I should have expected them to be here. She starts telling me it’s a staff-only meeting, which is why I wasn’t told about it. I start yelling at her about how they’re more concerned about covering their butts than about taking care of people. I realize that I’m dreaming, become lucid. The dream scene fades, and I’m in a quiet darkness.

I am aware of my sleeping body, and I realize that in order to stay asleep, I’m going to have to reconnect to my dream body. I start rocking side to side, feeling my body move, and I have a weird split sense for a few seconds, as if I’m trying to make sure I’m not moving my physical body at the same time. I start rocking and swaying my arms, as if I’m dancing to myself. The dream scene shifts, and now I’m in the yard of a house that I don’t know, although in the dream it’s my house. It is two stories, with the back of the second story being a large glassed deck. I fly up into the air a little bit, but I don’t have any place I want to go, so I just settle back down. I decide to go into the house, and explore around. I land on the second story entry, and go in through the glass doors. I walk from room to room, looking at the furniture and trying to get deeper into the dream state. The ND lights flash again, and I just let them pass, acknowledging them, but not letting them bother me.

As I’m walking around the house, I get the idea that I ought to try out being someone else. I have gotten down on my hands and knees to check out something on the floor, and I get the idea that I ought to try being a cat. I walk on my hands and knees for a minute, and then shift and become a cat. I can feel the change in the way I move. I look at my reflection in one of the glass windows, and realize that I’m Buio (my cat)! Oddly enough, I can see my cat-reflection in one window, but when I turn to another, the view is diffracted, so that part of me looks like the cat, and part looks like my hands-and-knees self. I feel like a cat, but not completely. I walk around, exploring the house from the cat’s perspective. I notice looking down one hallway that there are tiny alcoves with beds in them; some of them don’t have mattresses, like they’re waiting to be made up. There are yellow and orange pieces of wall sticking out into the hallway. They look decorative. I remark to myself how bright the colors in the house are.

I think to myself that I want to try leaping up onto a counter, to see how the leap feels. I’m feeling more and more catlike. I want to find a bathroom counter, so that I can see myself clearly in a mirror. I also want to rub my head against the mirror. I find a bathroom vanity, but it has too much stuff on it; there are glasses and stuff all over beside the sink, and I’m afraid I’d slip on them and not make the jump right. I keep looking. Eventually, I find the same counter again, and decide that I can probably make it, but I wake up before I get to try. *end*