deciphering the unconscious

This morning, I had the kind of dream that distracts you for the rest of the day.

Lately I haven't been remembering many dreams at all. When I do dream, they tend to be the usual bizarre/surreal reflections of reality. I usually dream about real people from my past, and over the years I've figured out what each person represents to me. So it was beyond weird this morning when a television character showed up.

I can speculate all sorts of reasons why House (not Hugh Laurie, but House), showed up in my dream this morning. I have no idea where we were -- it wasn't any house I've ever lived in or even visited, at least that I can remember, but it was definitely a house and not an office or a hospital. I'd say I was in my late teens or early twenties in the dream, which is another bizarre thing. I don't know what I was doing there, or what he was doing there. There seemed to be some kind of relationship between the two of us, but what exactly it was I can't say. It seemed vaguely romantic, which always makes me feel weird because I'm married with kids, even though in the dream I was barely 20 and obviously single, and the offspring didn't exist.

I don't like it when my dreams rewind my life like that. I don't like this apparent attempt to rewrite what really happened, because even though some of it sucked then, I really like where I am, now. Except, of course, for the whole thyroid cancer thing, and the pending biopsy. Which brings me around to the most likely explanation for TV's best doctor showing up in a dream as somehow indefinably mine: wouldn't it be awesome to find a doctor who could fix everything about me that's broken, once and for all?

Impossible dream.