I Dreamed The Same Ward, The Same Bed, And The Same Nurse For Six Years

The dream: a ward with six beds, a window on the left with a broken blind that hangs at an angle, and a nurse with a plait who says, "You're very calm."

That is it. That is the whole dream. It is not frightening and I always woke up feeling perfectly all right.

I had it, on and off, for six years.

Last April I collapsed. It was my heart; it was serious; it is fixed now, thank you.

I was taken to a hospital in a city I do not live in, because that is where the ambulance was.

I came round in a ward with six beds. The blind on the left window hangs at an angle because the mechanism is broken; it has, I later learned, been like that for years, and there is a maintenance ticket about it that has become a running joke on that ward.

A nurse with a plait leaned over me, looked at the monitor, looked at me, and said: "You're very calm."

I said: "I know."

She said, "Most people aren't, first time."

I said, "It's not my first time."

She thought I meant a previous cardiac event, and she went and got my notes, and she came back and said there was nothing in them, and I said, "No. It wouldn't be."

I have not told her, and I never will, because she is a working nurse with fourteen patients and she does not need my dream in her head at three in the morning.

I have thought about this constantly since.

Here is what I keep landing on. The dream was not a warning. It did not tell me to see a doctor. It did not save my life; the ambulance and a surgeon called Mr Adeyemi saved my life.

All the dream did — all it ever did, for six years — was make sure that when it happened, I would not be frightened.

I lay in that bed with a broken blind and I was not frightened, and I have never been able to work out whether that is the kindest thing that has ever happened to me, or the strangest, and I no longer see why it cannot be both.