funny ER dream

ER was a mainstay of the latter days of my TV addiction. At that time the local station was rerunning episodes from the first three or four seasons, at 10:30 every night of the week. It was rare for me to miss an episode, and after a while the show worked its way into a dream.

(Like all the other dreams, this is edited for clarity, but not for content.)


The dream starts like a typical episode of ER - without the opening credits. It's a slow afternoon, not too crowded, and most of the characters from the earliest seasons are there: Dr. Carter (Noah Wyle), Dr. Greene (Anthony Edwards), Nurse Hathaway (Julianna Margulies), Nurse Adams (Yvette Freeman), but not Doug Ross (George Clooney). However, I also work in the ER. I'm not a doctor, nurse, janitor, clerk, or receptionist; apparently I'm some sort of equipment technician or repairman, because I'm never directly involved in actually helping patients. Whenever an emergency comes in, I stay out of the way, except to move a piece of equipment in or out of a room.

After several hours of this, as I'm replacing a bulb in an X-ray lightbox, I begin to have chest pains and tingling in my left arm. I start to slump backwards off of a stepladder, but fortunately Nurse Adams is there to catch me. She and some other nurses pull me up onto a table and call doctors Carter and Greene, who begin to ask questions about my symptoms. Everyone around me seems pretty worried as they're hooking up the equipment, giving shots, etc. Eventually it gets fuzzy and dark...

...and then I'm watching my own open heart surgery from above. It's not a near-death thing, I'm just seeing what the TV camera sees, which surprisingly doesn't look very gory...

...and then I wake up back in the ER. There's an IV in my arm, and other monitors, but no oxygen mask or nose tubes. There's not much pain at all, but I feel a little groggy. Someone wheels me from the ICU to a different room, where I eat a couple of meals, watch TV for a bit, and generally make an extremely rapid recovery.

That evening, Dr. Greene comes in and tells me I'm okay to leave, but I should stay home and rest for a week or so. After he leaves, I get dressed and start walking down the hallway to the big sliding doors. But before I pass the desk, Nurse Hathaway walks up and sits me down in one of those double chairs along the wall. She compassionately takes both my hands in hers, and says, "We're all relieved that you're okay, and we are so glad that we could help you. But if you happen to get sick again, you should go see a real doctor at a real hospital. We're just actors and don't have any medical training. Okay?"