I recently had one of the vivid dreams I've tended to experience ever since being on chemotherapy for multiple myeloma.

I have so many different drugs flowing through me at any given time that I can't be sure which one causes the dreams.  Or perhaps they are due to some particular combination.  I was also fighting another sinus infection at the time, so the antibiotics, decongestants, and cough suppressants I was taking may also have been a factor.

Whatever the cause, it's not as relevant as the emotions evoked by the dream, and how similar I found them to some of the emotions I go through in dealing with my cancer.

As with most dreams, this one seemed to pick and choose from different parts of my life and mix and match them in a way that had little in common with reality (at least my reality).

In my dream, I was out for a bike ride when I decided I needed to stop at a bike shop (which coincidently just happened to appear on the next corner) to get a flat tire fixed (even though my tire wasn't flat).

Instead of taking the bike into the shop and asking them to fix the perfectly good tire, I decided to go around back and park the bike in a back room, then go hunt for someone to come and service it.  When I returned, the bike was gone.

I searched the labyrinth of rooms within the shop, which from the outside hadn't looked to be much bigger than a two-car garage, but on the inside gave the Smithsonian a run for its money.  I think this may have been related to the “Doctor Who” series I've been watching, in which the Tardis is much bigger on the inside then its Police Box appearance would suggest.

Regardless, I didn't find my bike, though the employees tried to convince me the oversized tricycle they found was indeed my bike.  Between the employees and the spatial anomalies, my dream self was starting to get quite frustrated.

Time sort of fast forwarded in my dream at that point (I guess you can't have a spatial anomaly without a temporal anomaly), and I spent the next several days or weeks (couldn't tell for sure) searching for my bike.  I could not find it, so I bought another one (from a different bike shop).

Ultimately, my bike did show up.  It turned out it had been taken by my arch rival for an upcoming bike race who didn't want me to be able to train so he could increase his chance of winning.  This was a bit of a surprise for me since I had no idea I was entered in a bike rice.  Furthermore, in real life this person was a friend of mine that I had coached soccer with for several years, so to find out he would go to such measures to win a competition against me was quite disappointing.

We never had the bike race in my dream, so I don't know who won.  However, my arch rival did go to court for stealing my bike, but the judge tossed the case out, citing that it was a harmless prank.  At this point, my dream self could take no more, so I gave the judge a piece of my mind, and he gave me three days in jail for contempt of court.

This is when I woke up, but the emotions from the dream were still strong within me.  I was outraged with the court system, I tried to figure out what I could have done differently, and I started plotting retribution against my arch rival.

I had to consciously calm myself down and remind myself this was a dream, the situation was not real, and that I should not be wasting time and energy time on it.

Low and behold, this was when I had my epiphany.  I realized that this is exactly what I put myself through so often when thinking about my cancer.

It's so easy to get caught up in considering the what-ifs and concocting all types of scenarios that may or may not happen.  There are so many times when I let my imagination run wild and start thinking, many times in quite a bit of detail, of what treatments I'll have to go through, what it will be like going through a stem cell transplant, discussions I might have with my doctor regarding treatment, how painful the disease will eventually get, how I will handle some of the more disabling effects of the disease, etc., etc.

As with my dream, my emotions can get pretty worked up when I start thinking this way and a lot of time and energy can be spent, or more accurately wasted, on this type of thinking.

While it's easier said than done, I've realized that I have to consciously force myself to avoid this type of thinking.  There are so many other activities that I could spend my time and energy on that would provide so much more benefit.

Peace, and live for a cure.