In preparation for my meeting with Sabine Lucas in September, I have started going through my dream journals. I found this dream from 2009:
Chris and I are at some kind of compound. Something happens there to his body. He has just 24 hours to live. A female worker shows me the room where bodies are processed. I don’t want to see, but she insists. There is a large room with a concrete floor. A body is spread-eagle, women are sewing a shroud that conforms to the shape of the body. They take long stitches, the muslin is a natural, unbleached color. The woman lifts a corner of the shroud, I see the decomposition of the body. They add chemicals to aid the process.
So we go home, we have an appointment at the facility at 11 that night, and the next morning. Suchi Sairam is somehow involved.
I look at Chris and say, “We have just this one day left together.” We plan to make love, but I also urge him to call family to say goodbye. He tries to call Scott, but the phone doesn’t seem to connect properly. Scott can’t hear him. I think he should call his mother, Cullan.
The workers come and deliver Chris’ body. It is in a fitted shroud. His body is like a murder scene diagram, with arms and legs spread open. Not composed as if ready to lie in a coffin. Lola comes and lays on one of his legs, like a guardian.
He is still with me, it seems, in the flesh. But I cannot understand how he can be dead and “alive” in the same house. I have a lot of anxiety about our short time together.
The next morning I begin to think about what to do with the house, where to live now that I am alone.
Day notes:
This seems to me to be a precognition of Chris’ near-death experiences in 2010 and 2011. In the fall of 2010, one year after this dream, he had surgery on his femur which resulted in a near-fatal bout of sepsis (blood infection). In the spring of 2011 he nearly died from an aortic dissection, which was repaired by sewing a channel made of Dacron into his artery.
Interesting that Lola guards his leg, and that he has two appointments with the “facility.” His state of being alive and dead simultaneously is like being in a coma.
This is a bit of a shadow of my recent dream, “Tree of Life Artwork,” where I am creating a sculpture with canvas.
Suchi’s husband is the mental health department head at Health East, which is where Chris spent rehab after his aortic dissection. There was an East Indian physician at Bethesda, the head of the brain injury rehab unit, who would call me every day and talk to me about Chris’ progress. She was an angel.