Tupperware Surgeon

Last night I fell asleep around 3am. I dreamed I was walking through the woods at daybreak. The sunlight cut through the trees in patches, and I remember thinking that if I stayed in the shadows nobody would know I was there. At some point I found a house in the woods. It looked like your average cookie-cutter suburban ranch home. It had a door painted puke orange. I don't knock on the door, I touch it and the door dissolves. I walk though the door way and the house is suddenly gone, along with the trees.

I'm standing in an open space...and there is a woman with me. I don't remember what she looks like, but I know now that she isn't a real person. Most likely a combination of people I've seen but never talked to. In the dream she is offering me food. This confuses me until I look around and realize I'm now in some kind of storage shed stacked to the ceiling with mismatched Tupperware. The woman tells me to take all the food I can carry. I can see now that there are large containers full of giant cookies and small pies. I dig through a pile of empty plastic boxes and find hundreds of miniature Shoofly pies. Each one has a tiny slice missing. I ask the woman if she has any Tupperware I can take home with me. She pulls out an empty blue pitcher missing a lid. I look inside and its caked with dirt. She takes me out of the shed and hands me a hose. I try to blast the pitcher clean.

As I look at a stubborn spot of dirt, she tells me to be careful I don't hurt it. I look closer at the pitcher and realize its alive...there are veins and muscles moving under the plastic membrane. I drop it in my shock and it unfolds on the ground until its a long rectangle about twenty feet long. Its soft and clear now, I can see red pulses inside that seem to be injuries in the tissues. The woman hands me a knife and tells me to cut the nerves so it wont feel anymore pain. I don't argue with her logic, because it made perfect sense at the time. I use the knife to slice through every nerve I can see. They are all yellow and look like noodles. The red pulses go away and the woman praises me. We sit down and eat pie together on the living pitcher-creature.

Then I wake up...

I'm not sure how to interpret this dream. Its a little random. I enjoy hiking and being out doors, so I think the forest in my dream is a safe place for me. The suburban house could be because I hate the apartment I live in and want something a little more stable. Or it could have nothing to do with my real life, maybe it was just a gateway out of the relative safety I feel in the trees. I have to say that I like this dream, simply because nobody I know died in it. My nightmares can get a little out of hand.

I can't get the picture of those neat little pies out of my mind, hours later. They all had the same little slice missing, and maybe that is about my life. I do feel like something is missing, always out of reach for me. Maybe its my biological clock ticking? I'm a little young for that. Or it could be because I haven't found an area of study, and I keep second guessing my career choices.

The dirty Tupperware...a metaphor for my life if there ever was one. I can scrub and scrub, but the spots never really go away. Maybe the constant battle for perfection is causing me physical pain, and this could be my way of acknowledging it.

I am pretty flummoxed by the surgery part. I've never wanted to perform surgery, in fact its the reason I don't want to be in the medical profession. Thats a lot of power in one persons hands. I would never want to be responsible for the many things that can go wrong. So is this part of the dream about overcoming my fears? If so then my subconscious picked a fear I never really think about anymore. How often do I find myself talking about the subject of me performing surgery? Almost never. Maybe thats not what its about at all. Maybe I was expressing the urge I have to throw away all our old Tupperware and buy a matching set.

What do you think? Am I looking too far into a meaningless series of events, or is this an opportunity to learn about the real me?