The Nightmare Begins

A friendly fella in the woods

I had gone to sleep around midnight without the help of Slava's little white pills.  Going to sleep was easy; staying asleep was not.

Around 3:00 am I awoke with a start, remembering a nightmare I had just had.

I was a stewardess in a large airplane, and Slava was a passenger up front.  In addition to the usual duties of a stewardess there was a passenger who really needed my attention because he was very ill.  He was emaciated, in a coma, and I was sure he was dying of AIDS.  He wouldn't last the trip across the Atlantic.  What to do?

I wrapped this young man in a blanket to keep him warm, sat down beside him, and enfolded him in my arms so that he might feel he was not alone.  He died, however, without ever regaining consciousness.

When the plane landed I was the last to leave.  Slava was nowhere to be found.  He was expecting to see me at home, but I had gotten word of back-to-back assignments, and I desperately wanted to get him the word.  I ran around shouting, "Where's Slava?" and people pointed me in various directions.  The smart thing to do, I thought, was to call his cell phone -- but I didn't have mine with me.  I asked a passer-by if I could borrow her phone, and it turned out that hers was the newly released smallest cell phone in the world -- a phone the size of a book of matches.  It had no buttons and worked by inserting a small card.  I couldn't figure out how to use it, but it didn't really matter because I didn't remember Slava's number (It was just something on speed dial on my absent phone).

Thankfully I saw Slava ahead of me, getting on a bus to take him to his car.  Running fast I caught up, and the driver asked where I was going.  At first I couldn't remember where my car was, but with some efffort I remembered that it was at 15th St.NW and New York Avenue.  The bus driver said it wasn't on his route, but he could tell I was upset and so would drive me there directly.  I was relieved.  My nightmare was over.

I know the source of many elements of this nightmare.  First, the frustration of helplessly dealing with a dying man.  That point was made in the book I was reading earlier in the day, Robert Massie's biography of Nicholas and Alexandra.  Empress Alexandra was much maligned in her lifetime and can be blamed for ignoring all signs that Rasputin was an evil scoundrel; nevertheless I was impressed in reading about her selflessness in nursing Russian soldiers returning from the Great War.

Massie quotes the empress' friend Anna Vyrubova who wrote, "I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room...holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments,...taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and ams, removing bloody and even vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war."

More mundane anxieties intruded on my mind.  Slava and I will have several separate trips over the next few weeks, and I'm worried about communication.  Having read speculation that the iPhone 5 will be bigger than any predecessor, in my dream state I imagined what the smallest phone might be.  And as my nightmare alerted me, I don't know the number of Slava's cell phone.

I don't think my nightmare was caused by anything I ate.  I might take a sleeping pill tonight, but I think I'll switch to melatonin.  It's worked for me before, and it might be all I need now.  Time will tell...