1.
A couple nights before I started my current lab rotation, I dreamt I was at lab meeting. I was attentive, but I didn’t understand the material. After the meeting, Andy, the PI, pulled me aside.
“You couldn’t follow that, could you?” he asks.
“No.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt. Everyone else already knows the stuff; I can just look it up.”
“You have to speak up when you don’t know something,” he tells me, annoyed, harsh. “You can’t be flustered by not knowing things. How are you going to give lab meeting or job talks if you get flustered when you don’t know things?”
2.
The next night I fall asleep listening to Tara Brach talk about meditation and trauma. I dream that I am watching a video of a woman talking about mindfulness, about the important of staying present. “Aft
er all,” she says, a chesire grin coming over her face, “all you have to miss is your life.”
3.
A week later, I dream I’m walking outside. Green, lush. I come across tall wooden stairs, the kind made of slabs of wood with space in between them, the kind I was terrified I’d slip through when I was younger and so small. A large tree hanging over it. Ripe oranges. All sensory; no thoughts. I walk up the steps to a dwelling with a series of bedrooms accessible from outside, a kitchen, a library room. I know that one of the rooms is mine, and I go in, and I sit on the floor, and I cry so hard. I cry for a for a long time. Not relief. An emotional state I don’t have a word for, for once. One of the other women there glances in, and then lets me be. When I’m done, I join the others in the kitchen.
