The Misinterpretation of Dreams

Today I’m post call and the lack of sleep has somehow changed me into a uncomplicated being. I just have simple needs today. I’m dreaming of getting into the bath and being clean (this is going to happen soon), eating a wholesome meal (this is unlikely to happen because I don’t have the energy or imagination to cook), curling up with a book and falling back to sleep after a nice chat with my boyfriend and may be after watching some low budget SA tv. No complicated or ambiguous dreams today. Just simple dreams. And I’m dreaming of waking up tomorrow feeling refreshed and ready for another 6day week. Here’s to facing the new week- a poem by ee cummings: 

I also dream of maybe one day being able to write something half as good as that! And those are enough dreams for one sleep deprived mind to handle for one day!

Living in the new South Africa, the Rainbow nation, people try to believe that colour doesn’t matter. It seems, most often, that’s it’s the wealthy white people who are most eager to believe this. I think it’s mainly because of guilt and fear. If black South Africans really thought about it, it wouldn’t be so unfair to make white people suffer. Wrong maybe, unjust maybe, unethical maybe, but not unfair!

However, working in the medical field, colour certainly DOES matter and it’s not ONLY because certain diseases are more prevelant among certain race groups.

A white patient in a public hospital is, more often than not, the most dreaded and avoided of all patients by doctors of all colours including white! They are called: PINK FOLDERS! I’m not quite sure where this name came from, it could be that back in the good old days patients’ folders were colour coded according to race. (In the good old days there were different entrances for white and non-white patients, and when a white women was in theatre or giving birth all non-white personnel had to leave the room! So the little space that says “Race” on the hospital card used to be VERY important.)

Now, most of the time, if a white patient walks into a public hospital it’s because he or she can’t afford to go to a private hospital. I believe that any white person who is poor has got to be below average intelligence. They weren’t clever enough to jump onto the gravy train while it was rolling by. And for white people in South Africa it rolled by for years at a very leisurely pace. OR they are white people who felt so secure in the position of privilege, they never thought the day would come when it would all end and they would have to share beaches with black people, let alone hospital wards. Either way, white people in public hospitals STILL expect preferrential treatment.

They don’t feel that they should wait along with all the rest of the patients, they should be seen first. They complain the loudest, every little pain means that death is nigh. They’re never quite happy with the diagnosis you give them unless it’s a terminal illness. They much prefer to be seen by a white doctor, and even better if it’s the most senior doctor.

So when we’re working through the pile of folders we all hope and pray we don’t happen to draw the white person’s folder because more likely than not it’ll be a complaint like: “My child’s got a runny nose.” And if you should happen to suggest something logical like: “Well maybe it would help if he was at home in bed, it is 4am in the middle of winter!” then they’re always less than happy.

The other possibility is that you get a white patient who is more than nice to all medical staff and goes out of his or her way to let everybody know how grateful he or she is. This is just another method to ensure preferrential treatment, it is much more effective than the first.

You may also run into a black patient, also in two common varieties. It could be an older person who has become so accustomed to being treated badly that they wait all day without complaining and are thankful for whatever treatment they receive. Or it could be a younger person who assumes that every non-black person is racist and they are receiving sub-optimal treatment just because they’re black. These can also become quite vocal and manage to rally the support of every other black person in the vicinity (they’re very practiced at recruiting supporters for a cause, thank goodness or apartheid would never have ended!) and they all verbally abuse you, leaving you feeling like you’ve been bitten by red ants on every inch of exposed skin, their words stinging like sharp little bites.

Then you get a whole lucky packet selection of coloured patients (in the Cape there’s no shortage of those) which can range from very poor and trying to do the best they can, very poor with brain alcohol damage and nothing you say or do actually has any long term effect, right to those who consider themselves well-off and better than the “other” coloureds- these might as well be pink folders as far as I’m concerned.

Now, I do have an admission of guilt: I’m not open minded! As soon as I see the patient walk in or as I approach them lying on the bed, I’ve already made up my mind as to the manner in which I’ll begin the consultation: “Hello Mevrou, hoe gaan dit vandag? Nie so goed nie?”* OR “Wat is vout?”** White patients automatically have negative points before they’ve even opened their mouths, so they’re much more likely to get the short version of introduction. They may be able to redeem themselves but it’s no easy task.

And sadly enough, 8 out of 10 times my prejudices are not misplaced. But look, change is a slow process. Just because the laws of a country change doesn’t mean that people’s feelings and beliefs automatically change as well. I think that those 2 patients out of 10 who prove me wrong are exactly what is right about South Africa. That old white Afrikaans lady who is genuinely respectful toward me, the wise black grandpa who shows me that just because you’re illiterate doesn’t mean you’re stupid, or that young coloured girl who’s trying to rise above poverty despite alcoholic parents and overcrowded schools.

I think 2 out of 10 is enough, for now. And maybe if I look harder, and try harder to stifle my tendency toward negative prejudices, I might just find a few more people proving me wrong.

*Hello ma’am. How are you today? Not very good? **What’s wrong?

I never ever liked sour sweets because they were sour and not sweet and therefore actually shouldn’t be called sweets. But some sour sweets are actually not so bad, so long as the sourness is only on the outside and they’re still sweet on the inside. That type still qualify as sweets. And some of them are so nice on the inside that they’re worth sucking through the sourness to get to. It reminds me of going to have a bath. The sourness is like actually getting up and going to run the water, but once you jump into that bath the sweetness of the warmth of the water and just laying there is so completely worth it! Or it’s like getting into the cold sea on a hot day, or even getting up to go to work (if you like your job) or starting to bake a cake… So if you know that the sweetness will be there after you’ve gotten through the sour bit, get up and go and do whatever you’ve been putting off!!

Most of us, by the time we leave high school, have some sort of dream of the path we want our lives to take.My dreams started a bit earlier: I remember being 7years old, the age where your teacher is the ruler of your universe and you hang on every word that flows from her mouth, and my teacher told me I should become a lawyer because I had the gift of the gab and if I was a lawyer I’d be rich and wear lots of gold bangles. So, that was what I was going to be! I decided there and then that I’d become a lawyer and went home that evening to find out from my mother what a lawyer was/did.

So for most of my primary school life I remember telling everyone I was becoming a lawyer most days, in between I’d daydream about the possibility of becoming an air hostess on a grand plane and fly around the world for free. But my family quickly discouraged that, you have to tall and slim to be an air hostess and even back then there were no illusions that I would be either. (My family was never of the sort to encourage a false sense of security, walking around with blinkers on or burying your head in the sand.)

I knew I could never become a nurse because the one day my brother was car sick all over my mother’s lap and I was car sick on top of that! Some days I dreamt of being an actress, but dismissed that because it meant you had to kiss somebody you didn’t even know and I was saving my kisses for Prince Charming.  Never mind the fact that I was never going to be tall and slim.

By the age of 12 my best friend and I had both mapped out our lives, the dreams had a little more form: 1) we were going to be rich and famous and when we signed classmates yearbooks at the end of primary school we made sure to state that clearly 2) my best friend was going to be a doctor and I was going to be a lawyer, we’d heard those were  good paths to riches, we hadn’t quite worked out the fame yet!

I can’t quite pinpoint the exact age that I decided that I wanted to understand exactly the intimate workings of the human being, in particular the brain and thought processing and reasoning and why people behave the way they do especially in their relationships with other human beings. Maybe it was because I felt that I was often misunderstood or wondered at how people reached certain conclusions regarding my actions. 

At the age of 9 I was so sure that mealie was spelt MIELIE (in English as well as Afrikaans) that when a teacher marked it wrong in a test I went up to her and  asked her why she had marked it wrong. When she showed me the correct spelling I was so angry with myself for having been so dumb, I stomped to my seat grumbling at myself for being so stupid, she shouted: DON’T STOMP YOUR FEET AT ME MY GIRL! YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU THINK YOU’RE TOO CLEVER! 

I suppose she wasn’t entirely wrong, I did think I was clever, but I wasn’t stomping my feet at her!

At 13 I was made to publicly apologise for swearing at school, in an attempt at humility (and feeling somewhat embarrased) I spoke very softly and never loooked up at the faces I was addressing. The interpretation of this  was that I was unremorseful.

Nevertheless, by whatever path, at the age of 16 I was at the point of dreaming of becoming a psychologist and understanding any person’s most intimate thoughts just by analysing the way they walked into a room or tilted their head or laughed. I’d also recently written in a emigrating classmate’s “memory book” that she should look out for my masterpiece novel that I was certain would be published the year after I left school. Career week was drawing near and in a conversation to an aunt I mentioned that I wanted to become a psychologist. She, a sister in the public health system, discouraged me (or encouraged, whichever way you look at it) saying that with my brains I could be anything I wanted and she thought I should become a psychiatrist, they were better paid anyway.

And so I began to find out what it meant to be a psychiatrist and what was the difference between a psychologist and psychiatrist. I spent career week with psychiatric patiens at King George Hospital in Durban. High school ended and I received a letter of acceptance to UKZN Medical School (UN Med School at that time) and I began what I thought was a journey of understanding.

By the end of my final year of medical school I had spent some time listening to the delusions of grandeur streaming from Bipolar sufferers who believed they had more money than they could spend in a lifetime (and they tried to prove it by buying anything that caught their fancy.) I had nodded understandingly to Schizophrenics who told me about the voices in their head that were gossiping. And I started to think that maybe insanity wasn’t so insane after all, I thought that myabe I understood madness, or why certain people’s chemical balance decided it was easier to be imbalanced. But I felt even further from understanding why exactly supposedly sane people did the things they did or said the things they said. 

Looking back I think that maybe I was focusing my dreams on the wrong thing or misinterpreting them. Maybe what I was really dreaming of was security and independance: financial, emotional, mental and even physical. So now, having worked for so many years following a particular dream, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, do I think I’ve wasted my time and energy? 

NO! I may not quite understand human behaviour or particularly like human beings in general (having observed their behaviour extensively) but I do believe that I have gained much. I’m feeling secure and independant and I understand that the more you know the less you understand. So, for now, I’m content with my minute volume of knowledge and my vast lack of understanding.

Having to be at work at 7h30 every morning and working about 120 hours of overtime per month may not be my dream job but, for now, I’m happy doing it. And, as I’ve learnt, each day brings new dreams. Today my dream job would be writing a column for a newspaper (The New York Times) or for a magazine (Marie Claire) but if I should look more carefully at that dream  I think it could be that I’m actually dreaming of flexibility in my schedule and being free to travel and see new places and maybe influence other people’s opinions and maybe it’s about letting my voice be heard.

I wonder what I’ll dream of tomorrow…

Driving on the N1 between Cape Town and Worcester around 23h00, the poorly-manufactured, nice-looking rental car shudders as it reaches 140km/h as I try to overtake a long truck. My wonderful boyfriend snores beside me and I can’t help thinking that this wasn’t exactly how I remember it being in my dream at 13years old. I don’t remember my knight, honourable knight, snoring quite so loudly, I’m sure his feet didn’t smell quite so pungent and I’m sure I wasn’t driving the elegant carriage. I think, in fact, that in my dream my knight didn’t sleep at all, never mind snore, his feet smelled like chocolate and I was the pretty lady who sat as a passenger in the elegant carriage while the horseman handled the horses. I think my knight brought me flowers and chocolate everyday and used words like ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ in every sentence.

Thankfully at the age of 24, I’m able to see in that dream things I overlooked or didn’t understand at 13:

1) My knight and I never had any intelligent conversations, I just sat looking pretty and smiled while he told me tales of his valour, most likely tall tales

2) I got fat on all the chocolate that I got from my knight everyday and he eventually left me for a prettier girl from a more wealthy family!

I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined that my Prince Charming would love me unconditionally, I think it was always an unwritten rule that if I worked at it hard enough I might be able to get him to love me a lot, but that didn’t mean that if I did something wrong he wouldn’t leave me.

No dreamy Prince Charming ever loved my cellulite! I had to hide it and pretend it didn’t exist and be in the gym at the crack of dawn every morning in an attempt to burn it up!! 

Mr Charming never jumped on a plane and flew across the country just to suprise me for the weekend, I don’t remember him sitting outside my door waiting for me when I got home.

So, looking at the evidence and weighing it all up I’ve decided that maybe reality is better. I’m going to look at my boyfriend’s big nose and love it despite it not being as regal as Prince Charming’s. Because I know that when he looks at my bush of hair he loves it even though he can’t quite run his fingers through it, and he loves every freckle on my face and he thinks I’m still the same size I was when I met him even though I can’t get into the dress I was wearing on our first date.

Love can be blind and dreams seldom come true, but who said that was a bad thing?   

When a friend first introduced me to blogging I thought it was silly, just another form of virtual communication. I hate virtual things, I want something real and tangible. Anyway, why would anyone want to keep a public diary?

But now I’ve been reading a certain friend’s blog regularly recently and I’m feeling inspired. I think blogging is for those of us who think we have something worthwhile to say. For me I think it’s just a safe way to write while still keeping my day job. I’ve dreamed of being a writer but I’m not sure if I’m good enough to be successful. So I’ve opted for the safe route: I’ve got the 9-5 which pays the bills but maybe this can be a space for me to keep in touch with my creativity, a space to vent, a space to embarrass myself publicly in an attempt to partake in a supposedly therapeutic excercise. 

We shall see what this excercise yields…