I have a dream…

…that I’d like to share with you. It begins where dreams usually do, in the bedroom.

That morning the sun shone through the blinds, the same blinds I’d left open the night before. Jules was a sound sleeper and anything but an early riser. She slept peacefully through the sunlight. I, on the other hand, always found it hard to sleep in. There was always something to do, a job, a task, or many jobs, many tasks, that awaited me on this, the day after the end of the working week. Only my working week never seemed to end. Working from home had a tendency to do that to you, make every day a potential work day.

That morning, however, I dozed and fell back into a light sleep, a Rapid Eye Movement stage of sleep, where dreams are made.

I was in transit, being moved to a ward. When I arrived, there were people and sounds surrounding me. They were hazy to the eye, difficult to make out. The room was dull but identifiable as a shared hospital room, public in the sense no-one made contact, either of a physical or verbal nature.

Without prior warning, someone appeared, a doctor perhaps, a female to be sure, standing over me, saying things to me, addressing me, in ways that were welcoming, calming and supportive.

“You’ll be okay through the process. There’s nothing to worry about. The anaesthetist will be the first and last person you’ll recognise in the operating room. After that, surgery will take about seven hours. You’ll wake in the Intensive Care Unit where a nurse will be on call twenty-four hours daily. After we’re confident you’ve made an ‘unremarkable’ recovery, we’ll move you to a general ward, which you’ll share with three other men who have had similar but different treatment. Once you can walk a flight of stairs you’ll be sent home to rest and recuperate before you start a rehabilitation program at a hospital nearby.”

I looked up at the doctor telling me this. She was young, about thirty-three, blonde, attractive to the eye with a sweet smile. If I wasn’t lying horizontal in a hospital bed I would have asked her out.

My surgery never eventuated. At least not in my dream. My hospital bed had suddenly turned into a lounge suite in an office, but there wasn’t much work getting done. The office was unfamiliar to me, completely unrecognisable from anything I’d experienced in reality, and I was an office-worker. But it was enticing, insofar as in front of the lounge suite on which I lay was a TV set, but not just any TV set, more a widescreen cinema in high definition.

Yet my attention had been diverted from the widescreen cinema by a voluptuous blonde, attractive to the eye with a sweet smile. She looked young, about thirty-three, and I must have known her as I had my right arm resting around her soft, supple back. Her eyes sparkled under the light above, her smile enticed, attracted. She was devoid of clothing, and as I slowly looked down I noticed I was too. I drew my own conclusions. We had all the time in the world. The office was closed, we were the sole occupants, and in no rush to leave our cosy locale.

Eventually, we rose from the couch, clasped our fingers between those of the other, and walked toward the office door.

As we opened the door to leave, the sun shone ever brighter through the open blinds in our bedroom, disturbing my pleasant dream, changing the scene from dream sequence to reality in an instant. I started to think about the dream and what it meant, as I sauntered towards the bathroom, throwing my PJ’s on the tiled floor, hopping under the shower and feeling the warm water against my naked body, starting to sing. The shower was the only place my voice sounded acoustically sublime, ringing out sweet sounds in dulcet tones.

In the bed remained Jules, blissfully unaware, asleep in a dream-world all her own.