Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Hospitals

HospitalsHospitalsHospitals really bother us a lot. We are exposed to them at many levels in our own lives and through media and entertainment. Whether you are the patient or the visitor, no one wants to be there. Yet to dream of a hospital is not uncommon.

As often as not, hospital dreams have little to do with sickness. However, in many hospital dreams, we have good reason to be there. They break down into dreams involving the emergency room, general care, intensive care, being unable to leave, and receiving nonsensical treatment in them.

Emergency room dreams have more to do with the well-being of significant persons and relationships than the emergency room itself. Many times, people involved in emergency room dreams are worried (excessively) about the people coming to see them or the person they are going to see in the hospital.

General care dreams reflect our sense of needing or being needed by others. Differentiated from the above dream, general care dreams do not reflect a crisis-level anxiety, but more of a dependent lifestyle. The relationship in a hospital is a one-way flow from care-giver to patient. This is a picture of dependence.

.Intensive care is a place of danger and, at times, release. We all understand that the really sick people are there. It may be that you are needing to let a person go, especially the chronically ill. It may also be a place that reminds you of someone who has already passed.

Being unwilling to leave the hospital may show that you are ambivalent about facing the world independently. For the nuisance that the hospital is, it is also a place of intense care and support. The nature of your illness may be a metaphor for the aspect of your life where extra care and support are needed.

Receiving nonsensical care in the hospital is often a way of working out or illuminating unbalanced needs or demands in life.

Everybody is paying attention to something you feel is unworthy of notice. Or, conversely, nobody will treat you for what you perceive to be the true problem. This can be truly funny if, for example, you acquire a large growth that strikes you as perfectly normal, but concerns others. It may become an object of obsession for numerous doctors, some of whom you may recognize as a boss from work, a romantic partner, a peer from some sort of leisure pursuit, etc. The darker version of this is feeling genuinely ill and being unable to receive treatment for it.

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