DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME

27 August 2002

I drove to the home of a friend last night, to return something I'd borrowed. While I was there visiting, I fell asleep. In my sleep I was dreaming about having to get home, because I was going biking with Cindy at 5 and had to be back home by 6 to drive Walt to the airport (he needed to be there at 6:30).

My friends, unaware that I had to be home so early, let me sleep and when I woke up, it was 6:45. In a panic I raced out to get in the car, only the car was gone. I assumed Walt had come and gotten it and driven himself to the airport.

I had to walk home, feeling very guilty about sleeping so late.

When I got home, Walt was still here, furious. He hadn't come to get the car at all. We went back to where I thought I'd parked it and looked everywhere, thinking maybe I'd forgotten exactly where it was parked.

The car had been stolen.

It was at this point that I woke up. It was 4:30 a.m. and just a few minutes before the alarm was to go off so I could get ready to go biking with Cindy.

I was very relieved to realize that it had all been a dream. Cindy tells me that I had a "classic anxiety dream."

Anxiety? Me? Nahhhh.

The anxiety didn't come until later. The dream was, in fact, prophetic, though it didn't seem to be that way initially.

I did get up and out in time to bike with Cindy, and we did 8 miles. The days are darker now. When we first started biking at 5 a.m., I'd turn off my headlight about halfway through the ride; now the headlight is still on at the end of the ride.

It's also colder now. I started biking in shorts and t-shirt. Now I'm in lightweight long pants and t-shirt with jacket over it (I take off the jacket about half way through the ride). I am assuming I will eventually, if we keep riding through the winter, graduate to something like sweat pants and sweatshirt.

I do love being out in the wee small hours of the morning, or the waning hours of the night. It's often like we have the whole town to ourselves (save for the occasional jogger or dog walker...or the idiot that curses at me when we pass on the bike path). We ignore stop signs and stop lights (if we get caught, Cindy tells me it's a $300 fine...and that when the students start returning to campus, the campus police are doing a much more conscientious job of patrolling).

I was back as Walt was in the final stages of getting ready for his business trip to Ft. Worth and I took him to the airport.

Home to a nice shower, to wash off the sweat from the bike ride, and then a somewhat lazy morning, with all of Dr. G's typing done (I thought). I even allowed myself a bit of time to sit and read. Unheard of.

Our first patient was due at 2 and I knew that I had to get the office vacuumed first, so I went down at 11. I thought about taking my bike, but when I stepped outside and felt the temps (hot) and realized that this was the cool part of the day, I wimped out and drove.

Good thing!

First thing that happened when I got in was that the lab called to get information about a patient. I checked the patient's chart and there were no progress notes. Yikes!, I thought. I left the transcription at home. I had a huge package of typing for Dr. G, but somehow I must have forgotten to put the transcription along with everything else. There was lot of time, so I got in the car and raced home to get the transcription.

Only it wasn't here.

No problem, I thought. I'll just reprint it.

I called up Dr. G's folder on Word Perfect and....the pertinent transcription wasn't there! I had never done it. What was worse, I had no tapes sitting here. That means that one of the four tapes I took back to the office contained un-transcribed dictation. So I got in the car and rushed back to the office, got all the tapes, and came home again to check them all out. Sure enough, one had transcription on it--but it's transcription that I've already done. I don't know if the missing dictation is there.

Then the hand-held dictation unit that I was listening to the tapes on jammed and I couldn't get the tape out.   The days was not turning out well.

There was also a tape in the transcription machine, so I listened to that. It's dictation from FEBRUARY that I never did--and we apparently never missed. What was bad about THAT was that I had been thrilled to find this tape yesterday, when I was cleaning up to put in the new monitor because I knew I'd lost another tape last month and thought this was the missing tape. Now it appears I've lost three tapes. I left the tape with dictation on it here at home and went back to the office again.

By now I was so flummoxed I couldn't even think straight. I tried getting the charts ready for the day, but had lost two of them. This was becoming ridiculous. It's a small office. We only have 250 patients. How could I lose two charts? (I finally found them on Dr. G's desk, where I'd left them.)

I got the vacuuming done and even, my god, washed the baseboard. But I realized how many things I planned to get done in the week Dr. G was gone, most of which I did not.   This included checking the bank balance.  I tried balancing the checkbook and "found" $1,000+.  I still don't believe it and meant to double check it before today, but forgot to come in to the office over the weekend.  Now I had two hours to do all the things I thought I'd have done during the quiet week.

By the time Dr. G arrived, my brain had stopped functioning. Just. stopped. cold. I couldn't think right, I couldn't give a coherent answer. I had the feeling I had just become a stereotypical menopausal woman that I type about all the time.

However, I guess the brain is like the other muscles--it just needs some stretching before you use it. Just as the first three miles are the hardest on a bike ride, I guess the first 3 hours of mentally coping were the hardest for me today. As the day wore on things got better and the day actually ended on a high note, so I sit here a happy camper after all.

I'm almost afraid to go back to sleep tonight. I'm afraid I might have another prophetic dream. I don't think I could handle two in a row.