I just finished reading this article on the New York Times’ website: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/opinion/cancer-treatment-dreams.html (sorry, it’s behind a pay wall).

In summary, this young woman is highly distraught over finding out she had metastatic breast cancer. Because she was so young (36), the doctors had a hard time recommending chemo and radiation treatments to her, because of the known, long-term, harmful side-effects they generally incur on a patient. They told her that, if it were their decision to make, they would be “50/50”, which is a nice way of saying, “I don’t know”.

In this piece, the author presents 3 dreams she had over the course of her cancer episode that led her along down her course of treatment:

1. A dream of two helicopters crash landing on a freeway, directly in front of her. This dream convinced her that she aught to have a mammogram done to check whether a lump she had found 9 months earlier was cancer or not (doctors at the time had said it was a benign cyst).
2. In another dream, she was carrying 2 jugs with which to put out a fire in her apartment, but only 1 of those jugs had water in it, which happened to be enough to put out the fire. This dream convinced her to have a single mastectomy instead of a double mastectomy, because “one was enough”.
3. The last dream was one of all darkness except for the voice of an American man who simply said, “You must continue with radiation.” When a decision was needed to “boost” the strength of the radiation therapy to kill some potential metastasized cancer that came up on a scan, this dream convinced her to move ahead with that course of action.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. Certainly, the conclusions drawn about dreams 1 and 2 may be her waking mind eagerly looking for meaning where there might not be any. I mean, she was emotional, desperate, and looking for answers. She could have read more into them than was there. Maybe she already had a gut feeling of what she should do, and these dreams gave her a sense of justification to move forward with that course of action. Maybe they were generated by her heightened state of anxiety. But, on the other hand, I have had situations where I was desperate to find the right course of action, and similar allegorical scenes in my dreams seemed to provide answers. Is there something deep down in our consciousness that responds to a deep and sincere plea for help?

The third dream leaves much less room for subjective interpretation. Where did that voice come from? From within? Or from without? The extra radiation did kill the cancer, but it left her with heart failure that she will need to treat for the rest of her life. What was the motive of the owner of that voice? Did this result in more good than harm?

I only have questions. I’ll keep working on my dreams in the meantime.

Please leave comments below.