The Heart of an Engineer

The worst dream that I remember happened as I was getting holes drilled in my head for the treatment of my Parkinson's Disease.  Named "Mortar Fire", it opened with my being in a foxhole on the beach, watching a sequence of mortar shell bursts move closer to me across the sands until one mortar shell lands in my foxhole with me and blows me to bits. Obviously, I was scared silly by the deap brain surgery (DBS).  But dreams deal with psychological stress.  Jeremy Taylor insists that dreams of death and dying indicate that a new identity is developing. In order for the new self to emerge, the old concept of oneself must be destroyed. It took me a while to realize that I, one who takes pride in standing alone, had placed myself in a position of trusting a group of people to take good care of me. The old identity of not trusting anybody very much had to give way for something new to emerge.

The next in this sequence of dreams (10/03/06: Got the Books on You) starts with me running out of a house at night with two books clutched in my arms. I figured out I could bend down and hide in the shadows along the gutter; my pursuer was far enough behind that he wouldn’t see me trying this trick. In fact, the gutter had some overhang, so I could crawl inside a sort of cave and plug the entrance with the books. My pursuer was fooled for a minute, but only for a minute. He came around to where he could get me in his sights and started shooting as the dream faded.

One way to get at the meaning of a dream is by talking to the parts of the dream to find out their significance.  I talked to the books and found out that they are the bad guy’s ledger and his diary. They documented very well how he had been exploiting the scene in the house. Another dream interpretation technique is to finished the storyline of the dream.  I came up with the following ending: “There I lay in the gutter, my body full of holes, my life blood running down the street. My spirit rises from my corpse and confronts my attacker. ’Oh you fool! You didn’t know that killing me would give me strength beyond your imagination. Your books are now full of holes and can no longer be kept hidden; you will pay for your crimes. As for me, I am now free to go wherever I want; thanks for the liberation.’”

The third dream in the sequence (1/12/07: Air Raid) unfolded as follows: I’m in a bomb shelter under an apartment house, explaining to my daughter how to tell how far away the bombs are falling. “Start counting when the airplane noise starts to die down, and stop when the bomb goes off. Here’s another airplane coming; it’s getting louder and louder and louder and—Oh, God! It’s right on top of us! Blam. Cathy, are you all right? Cathy, where are you? Cathy, why don’t you answer me?” And then the apartment house collapses on top of me.

Notice that my experience of the feminine (that which encloses and surrounds) moves from a hole in the sand to a house, then to my daughter. That’s progress! The forces that would do me in become less focused, less personal, and more spread out, starting with an unseen enemy lobbing mortar shells at an obvious target, then moving on to a man with a gun going for a hidden target, then to an unidentified airplane of which the pilot doesn’t know I exist. That too is progress.  Now I go to bed wondering, with some sense of dread, and yet very curious, about how I am going to die tonight.  I fairly sure that the worst is over; it's down hill from here on out