Dreams

Most residents, I'm sure, dream about work. It occupies so much of our waking day that it cannot help but intrude upon our sleep. Sometimes when we are on call, this creates an indiscernible amalgam of patients, images, decisions, communications that blend reality with imagination. In dreams, I have seen lab values, made diagnoses, realized new things about patients, and I will be the first to say that sleep deprivation puts (real life) patients in danger. This, fortunately, is being addressed with more reasonable work hour periods and does not pose such a problem in anesthesia where patient care occurs in concentrated defined periods of time.

Last night, I had a dream of a patient in intensive care I had seen before. It was continuity of care, and the patient's evolving clinical story played out. Yet when I woke up, I couldn't figure out whether it was a patient I knew from my ICU rotations or from prior dreams. That strange haze of deja vu makes our dreams so vulnerable to interpretation as reality. It was fascinating for those of us who wonder about the biology of dreaming and terrifying for those of us who have to care for patients.

I also had a period of lucid dreaming, that is, dreaming where I knew I was in a dream. I could control the dream too, and what else would I do but go raid some candy jars? (Dreams are so odd sometimes). In the middle of this dream, I wondered about an experiment to see if glucose levels in the blood change when someone dreams of eating candy. The dreams I have...maybe I'm getting too much sleep.

Image of the Cheshire Cat is in the public domain, from Wikipedia.