Last night I dreamed I was in the kitchen. It was no kitchen I'd ever seen. Nothing special about it. But it was not mine. Mom and Dad were there. We were talking and I was washing a pan in the sink. That was when the spiders came out. About five or six of them. Little, black jumping spiders. I felt their legs tickle across the top of my hand as they crawled and leaped. And then they began to swarm. Hundreds of spiders, a demon army of tiny biters, gnawing into my arms...
I woke up in the on-call room (where I'm writing this). I turned over on my back and looked up into the dark. It was quiet except for that industrial hum you hear in big buildings. Most of the time it goes unheard. It's just background noise. But it's never truly silent here. The hospital hummed and I let my left hand search my right arm just to reassure myself... that dreams are just dreams.
When the pager shrieked to life, it took me a moment to realize what was happening. Oh, I'm at the hospital. I'm the chaplain on-call. And that's the pager. How strange it is to wake up and put on the garment of one identity... or another. When I wake up in the middle of the night, especially in this place. The stories I tell myself about who I am... what I am... why I am... gather about me like a fog. But in the first few moments, I am No One... and pure being.
It was a Code Blue. A cardiac event. I roused myself, put on my clothes, gathered my cluttered thoughts, and went down... down... down.
The patient's companion was there. She was scared. The doctors and nurses injected medicines and tubes for ventilation for the patient. Still half asleep, I found his anxious loved one waiting outside...
Sometimes it is jarring, going from strange dreams to strange realities. Who knows which is which? Drifting in from the night into someone else's story (she has known him for two decades). Setting aside the biting spiders and my wounds to bear witness to another's nightmare ("even if it's his last breath, I have to see him"). Going from my ambiguous history into another's mystery ("before you knew it, we had a child together").
There is so little I understand. I search and seek, but find few answers. But occasionally I look into the solar eclipse and see light spilling out over the edges of darkness. In life as it happens, in this ongoing river of mystery... we can look into the black heart of Mystery, and if we look hard enough... if we look with one another... maybe we'll catch a glimpse of meaning as it escapes the edges of darkness.
They were able to save him.
For now.
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