If I ever forget to take my medication at night, I have what I call a “medicine dream.” This is a dream about medicine that somehow wakes me up so that I can take my meds.
“Uncanny!” you say. But it’s happened several times.
The last one I had was extremely emphatic and woke me up right away. Here’s the plot of the last dream:
I was staying at my grandmother’s house on Lake Erie. It seems I had forgotten to bring my medication with me that night, so, of course, I couldn’t take it. My brother was trying to get CVS Pharmacy on the line so that he could order the lithium and my other medications for me -- not a lot of lithium and meds, just enough for one night. He didn’t know the phone number, so he called information. But information kept putting him on hold. We so wanted to reach CVS. All of us, my whole family, was very panicked. In a rage, he hung up the phone, and left my grandmother’s apartment to go down to the shore of Lake Erie. Down by the shore, he lit a fire, something we liked to do when staying with Grandma. But the fire blazed out of control and started to flame up the hill, burning the grass. Pretty soon, the flames threatened to engulf my grandmother’s apartment. In my sleep, I saw huge, hot flames about to overcome us. That scene startled me awake. In essence, I woke myself up.
And at that point, I remembered that I needed to take my meds.
The brain is a powerful thing. Medicine dreams come in handy. It seems if I forget something so important like taking my medication, my brain finds a way of waking me up to take it.
Thank God for my medicine dreams. They’ve saved me from missing my meds on many occasions.