Such Dreams as These...

Thursday Rich got his transfusion. Two units. We arrived at 1 pm; we left at 6 pm. He said he felt a bit better. The next morning he woke up and told me about the amazing dream he had had.... He dreamed that he woke up during the transfusion, got up out of bed and started dancing around the bedroom. He said it was like a soft shoe routine and that I woke up and told him he shouldn't be dancing yet but he explained to me, “Lisa, the person who gave me this blood is a minstrel, now it's in me and I need to dance.” Then the music changed to “On the Street Where You Live”, and he was tap dancing and singing. He said he was very happy, and I was smiling, and then he woke up.





While still in the hospital, we gradually discovered that the early days when Richard was lucid for us, it was in fact the Dream Time for him. It wasn't until sometime after the third week, after they placed the drain tube in his liver that he began to tell us how the time had been passing for him. Following is my best effort to recount his experience as he dictated it to me over the past few weeks.

More and more he's been able to recall his journey. The other night we were watching the show “Bones”, and during a scene with the holographic skeleton reconstruction, he had a flashback. The little lights were falling in slow motion, the room was revolving... Rich said “I was there, Lisa!! That's where I was! It looked exactly like that only without the skeleton.” I couldn't tell if he was happy or sad.

He doesn't remember the MICU as we do. For him it was like the hologram in “Bones”. Lights falling like snowflakes, with random curved tubes of illuminated colors weaving through the room like liquid light. The nurses and doctors he remembers as robots, like R2-D2 and C3PO. He said they seemed friendly enough, but for some reason he was afraid of making them angry, so he tried to be very polite but said as little as possible to them.

During visiting hours he sometimes had complete conversations with people, none of which he remembered. He remembers seeing Christy and Denny because they were Pink. He remembers Wade and Caroline because they were Blue. Buddy and Michael were Purple. He remembers his brother Ed being Blue. He kept insisting that my brother Chris was one of the paramedics in the ambulance that brought him to the ER. He said I was always white.

He was very busy while in MICU. He was leery of the robots and did his best to be polite to them and avoid them. The first adventure he remembers, I was taking him to a huge, glamorous ball at a millionaire's mansion and the only way to get there was to travel in a velvet hot air balloon. Once there we had to wait in a long line on the beautiful grounds to give our donations so we could enter the ball, but Rich wanted to leave. I tried to make him the center of attention because they were all so depressed and I knew Rich would cheer them up, but he wanted to move on. Sometimes I was with him on his journey, and sometimes I was somewhere else waiting for him...

He did quite a bit of traveling. All the traveling was on an old steam engine train and Tom Cruise was the engineer. Rich's train was in competition with another train, and who ever got to the coal first would win everything—the trains, the tracks, the land and towns. Rich didn't care about the competition, he just enjoyed riding on the train and wanted to get home. When the train stopped,he would get off and visit amazing places. He found himself in a land that was incredibly green, with beautiful trees and gently rolling fields. He came upon a man standing outside a HUGE cone shaped building. When Rich inquired, the man explained that it was the world's largest house, and Rich found that strange because it was an upside down cone. He asked if he could look inside but the man said no because it was full of stuff. But if Rich would help him take everything out of the biggest house and put it into this nearby house he just finished building, then Rich could go inside. Rich said he wanted to help but he had to keep traveling, so he moved on.

Then he came to “the Land of the Hedge Hog People”. They looked like hedge hogs. They were shy but they were friendly enough. They were very busy, explaining to Rich that they bury their meat in the ground, leave it for three days and then dig it up and eat it. Rich thought this was a bad idea but he was afraid to say anything that might offend them. Then they tell him that they don't understand why so many of them are dying. He still hesitates to tell them it might be the way they store their meat. He really wants to leave this place and find his way home. But now I'm in his dream and telling him that I have made him Mayor of the Hedge Hog People so he needs to stay here and help them. He gets increasingly upset with me, he wants to go home, but he says I'm holding his wrists and won't let go. I think this must have been the period when we had to have him in restraints. He said that I explained there was land beyond the Hedge Hog People where people were desperate for coal, but the only way to get there was on the train over rickety tracks. I told him I knew he could do it so he tried. After the people had their coal they were very happy and wanted Rich to stay with them.

Sometime later he left the Hedge Hog People and his journey continued. Everything was beautiful and green again. He was in SC, waiting in a van with some guy he didn't know. They seem to be there for the same reason. They were both shaking and shivering. Then people took them out of the van and propped them both up against these poles over looking a peaceful blue lake. The people were being very kind about preparing them for their deaths, reassuring them that it would be fine and it would be for the best. Once they were dead, a core would be taken from their brains and that would entitle them to be buried in the highest honorable way. Some guy was counting down to their death. Then he pronounced them both dead. And Rich said to the other guy, “if we're dead how come I can still hear him talking?” All the people were shocked that the two men were still alive. The man who had counted down to their death shook their hands and congratulated them on being miracles. They invited them to stay with them, but Rich said he wanted to find his way home. They told him they didn't think he could do it, but he was going to try anyway.

Rich moved on to a shabby motel run by an old cowboy movie star. Rich took a room so he could rest, but he soon found that the owner was stealing money from his credit cards. Rich got angry and demanded to know where he was and what was going on. One of the robots told him he was at ______________Medical Center.

The entire journey the train tracks ran through beautiful forests that occasionally opened onto grassy fields or dense swamps, or crystal clear lakes. And all he wanted was to find his way home.

I didn't learn until he was well out of MICU and regaining his strength just how far away he'd really been. For the most part he had been able to respond appropriately—he knew who he was and had a good concept of time but he seldom knew where he was, and we had no idea he could not see anything beyond lights and shadows and colors.

Whenever he was reoriented to the room, it was like being in the hologram of “Bones”, and the floor became transparent and he could see rivers of thick, iridescent, liquid colors swirling beneath the floor. He still tells me how vivid the colors and lights were, like nothing he'd ever seen before. He's just as certain that he never saw “The White Light”, or the tunnel leading to it; never heard someone calling him from the “other side”; says he never felt the presence of celestial beings. All he knew was that he wanted to go home and no matter how tired he was he had to keep going.

It was weeks before he could relay his journey to me in the detail I've provided here. We compared notes and could sometimes correlate a particular experience he was having with something I was experiencing in my dimension.

Sometimes I look at him now and I'm not sure his magical mystery tour is complete. Not when a blood transfusion causes him to channel a minstrel.

I'm no longer concerned for his journey. Ever since I've known him he's been able to charm everyone who crosses his path, so I have no worries of hedge hog people, or eccentric conical home owners, or medical robots. I'll admit I'm a bit concerned that Tom Cruise is the conductor of his train.

I'm not afraid of his journey.

I am terrified of being left behind at the Station.