You know, dreams can tell a lot of things about ourselves. What I learned last night was that except that I have a very active imagination (that’s not new though), I am also a coward. Oh, and that dreams can hurt.
So, the dream starts with me being part of the Serenity crew, working as a cook. For those who have seen the pilot episode of “Firefly“, the old crook lady called Patience was always a problem for captain Mal. This time, she has kidnapped our doctor. Mal and the crew try to rescue him and during the act they kill a person that was lying next to Patience. Apparently, in the skirts of space, where there are no capable doctors that don’t work for the Alliance, Patience needed a heart transplant without getting caught by Alliance troops and the guy that got killed in the cross fire was the person that the doctor would have to kill and give his heart to Patience.
The crew loses the fight and a new heart transplant donor must be found, or Patience would kill the crew. The doctor does blood tests between all of us, and apparently my heart and Mal’s are compatible with Patience’s. They all look at me, to give my life voluntarily. I decline in fear. This is the first time I felt like a freaking coward. I couldn’t do what’s right to save the crew. Mal has no alternative but to get ready to give his heart to Patience. Seeing the captain in the surgery table I urge him to stop. I tell them that there is another way out.
I have some experience as a medical nurse (in real life too, before I studied programming I was a nurse). The idea would be for me to get in to an Alliance hospital and find another subject. While being part of the Serenity crew, I never took part in their thievery, and so I was not a wanted person. So, I enter the hospital, I change my clothes to a doctor, and try to find the right patient, by reading their digital medical cards. I found a few, but they all seemed with superficial medical problems, they would soon become healthy. I could not sacrifice their lives for Patience’s. And so I go to the section where cancerous patients are kept. I find a compatible donor, who could barely stand up. He has no hair in his head and according to his medical card, he only has a few weeks to live. I tell him that I am a new doctor and I lie to him that the Alliance wants him dead for something he did years ago and this is why they don’t treat him properly. I tell him that if he follows me outside of the hospital, we will treat his cancer. He believes me. We make it out of the hospital and nearby Wash is awaiting for us with one of the Serenity’s shuttles.
The surgery goes as planned. The patient dies, Patience lives — with a brand new heart. The crew is freed. But I feel an extreme sense of shame & guilt. I can’t bear it. While the crew is outside the infirmary, I go into Jayne’s bunk to find a weapon to kill myself. I just killed an innocent man and I can’t live with this guilt for the rest of my life. The captain sees the bunk’s door open and he enters it, seeing me with a gun on my head. He talks me out of it. He says that I now I am truly part of the crew, and that what I did was the right thing. I respect the captain, but this doesn’t heal everything. The means don’t justify the act.
Fast forward a few days. We get news that Alliance has pinned us down for the kidnapping of a patient. We are on foot to get back to Serenity, when we are getting ambushed by Alliance troops. Jayne and captain fought them, while I… played dead. This is the second time where I feel the cowardness in me. In other similar situations on other dreams of mine, I do the same thing: I play dead and try to find the right opportunity to just slip away, instead of fight.
This time didn’t work as well though, as an Alliance officer takes a good peek on me and sees that I just play dead. He just shoots me point blank, but not before I put my arms in front of my head. The bullet goes through the back side of my arm. I feel the pain in my dream, and in fact my arm hurts for a few minutes after I woke up too.
Anyways, to make the long story short, we are under custody by the Alliance, Jayne and Mal are in a prison cell, I have my wound taken care of and then I am thrown into a filthy prison cell too. Soon after, I start to sing like a bird to their interogators (cowardness No3), telling them that I have nothing to do with their illegal activities and that I am just the cook in the ship. The dream ends with me in that same filthy prison cell (woke up because the people up stairs made lots of noise again).
Of course, you might see the whole thing from another perspective and think that I am simply not a hero, instead of being a coward. There is a vast space between the two definitions. Maybe I am just “normal” and my actions might have just been “ordinary” (rather than heroic or the opposite). Dunno…
In conclusion, you are probably wondering why did I decide to write about this dream here. Well, my blog is my shrink. Hopefully, I learned something from this experience, even if it was just a dream. Also, there is a reason why many religions endorse confessions: they take a weight out of you. What better way to share all your ‘dark secrets’ with any and every one who cares to read rather than a shrink who only cares for his $50 per hour?
