Anxiety

During the last hour or so of sleep a few nights ago, I dreamed that we were in Egypt. I was talking to a travel agent over the phone and at the same time I was urging my son to look at a New Yorker cartoon. The cartoon – wholly a product of my imagination – covered a full page. It pictured a resort with water falling into a pool, at the edge of which sat an elderly man. Falling down along the course of the waterfall was a succession of plump creatures, like walruses or seals. They were piling up around the edge of the pool, alarming the old man, who was on the phone asking his secretary, sitting far away in Vienna, to do something about the ongoing catastrophe.

I don’t remember if my son looked at the cartoon, which in my dream (and only there) I found hilarious. The travel agent to whom I was speaking on the phone told me that he was sending me information about our flights. He said he was embarrassed that he wasn’t yet able to confirm them but that he was sure they would be confirmed before our departure. “That won’t do,” I told him somewhat heatedly, and asked him to find another flight, a flight that could be confirmed immediately. “That would take too much time,” he said. “You’ll have to do it yourself.” The dream ended there.

My conversation with the travel agent suggests that I’m anxious about our December tour of Egypt. I hadn't realized I was anxious, although it’s not unreasonable to feel that way. Consciously, I’ve been worrying mainly about taking a minimum of belongings, packing light, not an easy proposition in view of the large number of absorbent pads, padded underpants, and medications I need to bring along, but that's probably a displacement for worrying about what would happen in the event of a medical emergency.

The cartoon is probably another manifestation of anxiety. It's likely that the creatures' falling represents my own fear of falling and breaking already fragile bones. More to the point, fat walruses and seals dropping down all over the place must be, to say the least, unpleasant, and the man’s calling his secretary to stop the deluge of animals was an exercise in futility. The animals would keep piling up and eventually kill him, just as my proliferating prostate cells may eventually kill me. My hormone treatment, by no means an exercise in futility, will nonetheless eventually fail and other measures will then have to be considered.

So why did I want my son to look at the cartoon? Maybe I felt that somehow he could protect me from disaster, since he’s young and strong, an idealized version of myself, just as the old man sitting at the edge of the pool is a version of myself and idealized to the extent of his having a secretary. For protection from disaster, though, I’ll have to rely on luck, insurance, my wife, and whatever good sense remains to me. Now that I’m conscious of my anxiety, I’ll face it and continue with our plans. I have no intention of changing them.