on dreams

The night before I return to work after having been on vacation, I always have an anxiety dream about anesthesia.  It's something that I hoped I would outgrow, and I guess I have to some degree, since for the entire first six months of my anesthesia residency, I had anxiety dreams about anesthesia every single night.  Most of these dreams had to do with the standard things that residents are anxious about--I had dreams about machine malfunctions, patients sitting up on the table in the middle of surgery, leaking canisters of volatile anesthetics that rendered me unconscious before I could reach the machine to turn it off.  But some of the dreams I had early on were completely nonsensical, like the one where I was at an airport and I was called upon emergently to resuscitate a sea lion.  Why was I in an airport?  Why a sea lion?  If this implies anything unsound about my state of mind, please also remember that I also had a young infant at the time, and the very fact that I was even able to sleep deeply enough to dream was a triumph in and of itself.

So anyway, the dream I had Sunday night was that I had to put a thoracic epidural in my own grandmother.  To what purpose it was unclear, but I do remember having to sit her up on the OR table and prep her back with Betadine while explaining to her in Cantonese what I was doing.  Aside from the construct, it was actually a very realistic dream, and when I woke up, I had to orient myself for a few minutes to decide whether or not my work day had ended or whether it was just beginning.

What anxiety dreams do you have about medicine?  Have they changed over time?  I would like to think that they will, or that I might at least at some point in my life be able to go on vacation without having to count on one full night of tossing and turning and dreaming with a pulse-ox tone backbeat.  But it's been more than 15 years since I last took a math class, and I still regularly have dreams about showing up for the big calculus final having not attended a single lecture (it's always something where I forgot that I registered for the class, and didn't realize it until the Add/Drop period had ended), so I don't have real high hopes that my medicine anxiety dreams will ever fully go away.