Episode 4
The emergency room is lit with stark white lighting. Flourescent lights buzz in their light fixtures. Shelves of medical supplies line up in neat rows in glass cabinets. I see little red boxes with biohazard signs. I smell disinfectant. I’m in a ten by ten room, just big enough for an exam table and some equipment. Instead of a door there is a curtain. I am a mouse in a cage. Eyes darting, nervous. Ill.
I feel sick to my core, rotton inside. I’ve been busted all the way down to helpless, my veneer of work and daily life left on the floor. The cruft no longer matters. I didn’t mow the lawn this week. The weeds will grow.
After my reset, I have a series of waking dreams, probably induced by the morphine or the huge doses of antibiotics. I don’t care what caused them…these are the best and most peaceful dreams i have ever had.
Outside the world is brown, blue, and green. Storm clouds roll through every afternoon against a moisture saturated and deep blue sky. That’s Mississippi in August. It’s beautiful. The color scheme of the ER is not beautiful. It’s about effectiveness over comfort. It’s totally human. Artificial. It’s a place of torment, of near misses, of sorrow and death.
Every few minutes, I scrunch up in a pain so intense my vision blurs. My wife looks scared. She’s trying to be brave but I can tell. My father runs around interrupting the doctors, stopping everyone who walks by in a hopeless attempt to get a quick solution. I would roll up in a ball like a roly-poly if I could. I’ve been sick for months with no known cause. I’ve had test after inconclusive test, but this escalation of pain lands me in the ER and into a CT scanner.
I am in surgery within 30 minutes.
Blankness
I don’t know if this happens to everyone who has emergency surgery but two days of my life are missing. I don’t mean I’m just asleep. Two days are somehow null. Null isn’t zero, it’s undefined. Void. Empty. It’s nothing. I can’t say I understand this, but it’s like my conscious mind was temporarily turned off by some primal function. Like a deer in the jaws of a mountain lion. I no longer struggle.
After my reset, I have a series of waking dreams, probably induced by the morphine or the huge doses of antibiotics. I don’t care what caused them…these are the best and most peaceful dreams i have ever had.
The dream
Listen, my normal dreams are about work. The deadline’s been missed, the client is angry… there is an emergency and I’m somehow standing around like an idiot or rushing to fix something. It’s all stress, stress, stress.
These dreams have a totally different feel and character.
I’m still me. But I’m not human. I’m a black bear. Not a big dangerous grizzly, just an everyday black bear. I weigh 400 pounds and i’m covered in thick, comfortable fur. I feel the dirt and leaves on my foodpads as I walk. I’m in tune with nature; i’m in nature, part of nature. And the world…it’s more vibrant than i’m used to. The colors remind me of one of those high dynamic range pictures. They are a little more saturated than my eyes can see. More real than real. The bushes have little berries on them. I eat straight from the bush. I root around in the dirt with my snout digging up little grubs. I drink straight from a mountain stream. I sharpen my claws on a long-leafed pine tree and smell the pine sap. It smells good.
The mountain has an earthy smell. It’s hot outside, but I don’t care. I swim around in a mountain lake. These woods are in the south. They feel like a mix of the Mississippi and Alabama woods. The leaves and berries are plentiful. The water is clean. I’m in Eden. I’ve gone from a hospital bed with a tube down my nose to living in Eden, and it’s great.
I am completely unworried about anything.
I have a slight temptation to run instead of getting in my car every morning for work. I feel better for a little while after the bear dreams. The bear brings peace.
The fear
It’s striking to have dreams where i’m just a bear walking around in the woods. The bear must be my spirit animal or something. What’s really unusual though, is the lack of fear and anxiety.
In everyday life, Heather and I live in a small and scrappy old house. Our kids are growing up just fine. We both work, and we try to save just a little for the future. I’m living a good life.
There is just one problem. I’m cursed with irrational anxiety and fear. It’s my biggest fault.
I’m not at all extraordinary. I’m not the computer genius I thought I’d be as a kid. I didn’t win most likely to succeed in school. I’m just some guy trying to make it through life, fearful of losing my job, messing up my family, losing my house, angering my boss, or a million other things. I can have a panic attack over my cell phone not working. Nothing that’s going to kill me. Just anxiety about the bananas I forgot to pick up at the grocery store.
I can’t see what a great life I live because I’m blinded by the fear. It’s irrational. Maybe it’s from the fact that Heather and I both have to keep working to pay the bills. We’re on a treadmill that never stops. The proverbial rat race. I have a slight temptation to run instead of getting in my car every morning for work. I feel better for a little while after the bear dreams. The bear brings peace.
The relapse
Three years later, I’m back in the hospital to repair scar tissue from the first surgery. When one requires emergency surgery, scar tissue just happens. Tissue sticks together as it heals. This time the surgery is planned and thus is not as bad. I wonder, though, if my spirit animal will come back and show me some peace. I’m honestly looking forward to that part.
Alas. I do dream. But my dream isn’t any great peaceful experience. It’s a disturbing stress dream centered around my current surroundings, the hospital. A burning and rocky crack opens in the floor of my room. Red devil hands reach up through the steam and soot to pull me from my bed down into hell. It’s Dante’s inferno.
Needless to say, I am not a fan of this new dream. Some small part of me thinks the bear didn’t come back because i’ve misbehaved in some way, maybe i’m a bad person. Maybe I ate one two many oreo cookies or fussed at my kids too much or messed up at work. No…I just wasn’t sick enough to jump out of my normal routine.
A message is encoded in the dream. It is revealed to me: Love everyone the way Jesus says. It’s not complicated. Don’t worry. Love everyone else. Because we are all part of the same thing.
The book
Fast forward several years after these dreams. I’m still working, still anxious. Fear drives my life. Let’s call it fear of the modern world. I’m scared that America will let me down. Or more accurately, that I will let me down and America won’t help me one bit.
One evening after work, I read a book by Marcus Borg. The story has a mystic element, it’s about Marcus’s own faith and of a revelation he experiences, a truth revealed to him in a vision. The stage is set. I fall asleep with his book in my hand, wishing I could experience something magical.
I wake up at 2 AM.
Love, don’t worry
I’m in bed, Heather is asleep beside me. I realize I’m the bear again. In this new dream, God is not the person of my Catholic childhood who had a white beard and sat on a cloud, but is instead the whole world. God is not anthropomorphized in this dream. God is much bigger. As if i’m just a blood cell floating around, and Earth is the organism I belong to. And God, who is everything, including me, removes my fear, wiping it away without any effort on my part. It is a feeling that cannot be adequately expressed in language. I have the most extra-ordinary feeling of being free from fear!
A message is encoded in the dream. It is revealed to me: Love everyone the way Jesus says. It’s not complicated. Don’t worry. Love everyone else. Because we are all part of the same thing.
Redeemed
I’ve studied this topic enough to understand that I primed my conciousness before this dream by reading Marcus Borg. Still, I feel better about life. A story about Nebudchannezar from the book of Daniel brings me comfort, although I’m quite certain I do not interpret it as the authors of Daniel meant.
Nebudchadnezzar, the king of the entire ancient middle east, knows that God is mighty, but gets haughty and puts up a golden statue. Which angers God. So God makes him insane and drives him to live in the desert with donkeys and eat wild grass for 7 years. And when Nebudchadnezzar recovers, he is modest before God, because he knows he was just as well off running around with donkeys in the desert as he was being king and that he is nothing but a man in the end.
Daniel was written around 170 BC based on the linguistic and other evidence…it’s just a story, and the real Nebudchadnezzar surely never ran around the desert like a donkey. On the other hand, there is wisdom in that story and in in my dreams too.
To worry is vanity. Do not be self centered. All people are part of something bigger.
Be the Bear.
I’m trying to be that way now.
