Great expectations, anxiety dreams

Last night I woke up every hour because I was so excited about seeing "Waitress the Musical" at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge tonight with twins Wendy and Lisa and my "twin" Margaret. I am lucky to have a prescient daughter who tells me when shows are going to be very hot. She clued me in, and I got the tickets when it was in previews, before the announcement of its Broadway run.

That is not exactly the point of this post. The point is that while having this great thing to look forward to, and coming from a fabulous dinner last night with my new friends from The Canoe Club, my dreams reveal the anxiety that lurks beneath the surface. For example, in real life, I have two scratches on my thigh, courtesy of an over exuberant dog. In my dream, Dr. Alyea, when giving me a checkup, noticed little dots in that area. He was worried that they were petechiae, those tiny dots that at one point in the thankfully distant past signaled low platelets. (As low as two. Hard to believe.) No they're not, I said, realizing that they were allergic reactions to a pill.

I guess it might be a sign of healing in your psyche when you dream of something potentially horrible and then realize it's not going to do you in.

In the rest of the dream, I had just returned from a great trip with friends, and when Dr. Alyea asked me where I had gone, I couldn't remember. I tried to call Emily, but couldn't remember her whole number and couldn't figure out how to access it in my contacts. When I finally reached her, she said we had gone to Paris and some Arabic countries, and I couldn't remember any of it.

I was grungy from the trip and had to take a bath, and when I got out and was wrapped only in a towel, Dr. Alyea said he might as well examine me then. He set up an exam table in a hotel room. Or maybe it was a school, because little kids were coming in there. I asked if they had to be in there, and he said yes, they had no place else to go.

Maybe this part of the dream was all about all those "little kids," i.e. the doctors so young they look children. And about the exposure.

But the sun is coming up, and a new day is drawing, with tennis at The Canoe Club, a dog to walk, and hopefully a nap before I make myself presentable, or as my mother used to say, get gussied up.