“[In the dream] I was looking at a bunch of cancer patients. Some of them were missing arms and legs, and the more patients I saw the more extreme the cases got. There was a woman with just a head, spine, and some internal organs. Just laying there on the bed. There were others like her, hooked up to machines. Then the cases got even worse. There were people with no heads, just bodies or broken body pieces. And they were still alive, still being treated. Some of the bodies had a piece of paper on their pillow instead of the head. Some of the papers had sad faces drawn on them, some had math problems.
Someone was explaining to me that everyday depending on how the patient does, their math problem is added to or subtracted from. The equation is worked on by doctors everyday. There were some beds where so many body parts had been removed there was no body left. Just a paper with equations. The person explained that the doctors factor down those problems until they reach zero, and then the person is pronounced dead, after their equation is solved. Everyone’s equation comes out equal, that’s just how it works and has always worked.
Then I was watching television, CNN, it was grainy. On the TV there was one of those math problems laying on a pillow on a hospital bed with concerned relatives surrounding it. It was somewhere in California, and it was the first known case of its kind. The doctors had been calculating but they couldn’t get the equation to zero. The person, whose body was no longer in this world, could not die because their math problem could not be solved. The doctors were going back through all the numbers of the person’s life, trying to find the mistake, the irregularity, in the pattern but they couldn’t find it. The math problem could not be solved, and though they were long dead, the person would be immortal.
In the dream I was angry and confused. Why couldn’t they just let these people die? Why does math have to rule over everything? I have math class next. I’m gonna be creeped out.”
Oh, to be a 17-year old living in a foreign country.