Waking up

A part of my skull was cut out and removed – they literally stored it in a freezer – for a couple of weeks. My wife tells me that I was in a coma for two weeks, but it was actually more than 45 days from the time I was taken unconscious to the emergency room at Parkland Memorial Hospital until I actually became aware that I was still alive. Of course, I did not know then that I had died on the street after being hit by the car. I remember people coming and going into my bedroom, but at first I did not understand where I was, why I was there and what had happened over the past seven weeks.

I had been moved from my room at Parkland to a room at the adjacent Zale Lipshy. What I do remember, quite vividly, were a dozen or more dreams that I must have had during those weeks. I do not know when I dreamed them exactly, since most of those dreams had no references to time or location. Most were in generic places such as restaurants, bedrooms, houses or other buildings, but I do remember dreaming about being pushed around the halls at Zale Lipshy, so that dream had to have been after I was moved there December 17, 2012. I can also remember a dream where I was in Oklahoma, where we had lived for ten years until about five years before that car hit me.

Here is a list briefly describing some of those dreams:

* A Tex-Mex restaurant operated by a woman, where the theme was a combination of Texas, Mexico and the Lone Ranger. This was one of a small chain of similar restaurants that curiously specialized less on beef and more on pork, sheep, lamb and goat.
* A restaurant where Jean and I waited for an hour to get served, and then our server told us that where we were was not a restaurant, but a part of Zale Lipshy designed to look like a restaurant to test something (I have no idea what). A man came to us to apologize and explain the situation, but I don’t remember what he was telling us.
* I was at Zale Lipshy, in my hospital room in the wheelchair, when I was handed a class of tequila by Willie Nelson. I was then pushed around the floor past several other rooms as the staff tried to get the drink away from me.
* I was helping Whoopi Goldberg set up a Christmas party somewhere near my hospital room. I was walking around talking with her and people who worked for her, like Tom Leonardis, her Assistant/Executive Producer.
* I had a couple of dreams about some pictures my wife had hung in my room at Zale Lipshy, pictures of she and I with Whoopi, pictures of my son and his future wife, etc. in that dream an Asian man had come in and stolen my pictures because he had a “thing” about Whoopi, and wanted to make a copy of those pictures. He did not just copy the picture of Whoopi, he copied the entire set of pictures that were on my wall. In the dream, the man spent a lot of time – several hours – making the picture, and eventually gave them back to me.
* There was a dream where Jean and I had a bad experience at El Chico Cafe. A manager of the Cafe came to me (in my hospital room) to find out what happened, and offered us another dinner at El Chico to make up for the bad problems
* In one I was laying in the anteroom of a church, which in my dream was adjacent to where I was housed at Zale Lipshy. In the dream I was on a small table or bench with my wrists strapped to the table. I have a vivid memory of the design and layout of the church; I was there alone until a man came in to straighten up the area. I asked him to unfasten the restraints, but then I understood that he did not speak English. Since I could not speak Chinese or Japanese or whatever it was that he spoke, we could not communicate, and he could not help me. However, he did return the next morning and proceeded to unfasten my wrists, releasing me from the table.
* I dreamed that my friends from high school and college, Jens and Sheila Stubblefield, came to the hospital to visit me and we talked about Jens being a high school baseball coach.

What did these dreams mean? Some of them were related to what was actually happening to me. For example I am told that Jens and Sheila did come to visit me. So that dream had a source in reality. And my dreams about my wrists being restrained was based on the fact that my wrists really were tied to the rails on the sides of my hospital bed. At the start of the surgery to remove a part of my skull to release the pressure from my expanding brain cavity, the doctors performed a tracheotomy, which is often performed to insert a tube for ventilation, which is often needed for particular types of surgery so that the airway is kept open for sufficient time. My brain surgery which was supposed to take about 90 minutes, ended up taking over three hours. Anyway, several weeks later, I became annoyed by the breathing tube hanging from my throat and kept jerking it off. To stop me from being able to do that, they would tie my wrists to the bed, so that’s where those dreams originated.

Most of the dreams did have roots in my memory, such as the ones about restaurants and about Whoopi, but like any dreaming, I have no idea what they might have meant. Probably nothing more than ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. I am less interested in what they mean – probably nothing – than the fact that I can remember them so well, even nearly two years after they happened.