Diagnostic Dream: Red Hot Coals



The top of my head has been drilled with three, neat bloody holes.

An iron pot filled with red-hot coals has been hung under my chin.

My arms are tied with a length of clear plastic tubing.

“We are going to boil your brains out”, one of my invisible torturers announces.

His voice is flat, matter-of-fact; he is a technician, not a sadist.

I feel the heat sear my throat and I scream, the sound becoming hoarser, a raw animal desperation, as the coals gnaw my larynx.

“Please God” though I can’t now believe in God—“ Please…”


I feel an emotion I have never known in my waking life – complete hopelessness; a black, no-exit despair…..

I have cancer, I blurt out, before I can think about it. I have cancer growing in my throat….

When I told the doctor I had cancer, he looked at me quizzically… I told him of the increasingly weird dreams I had been having… It was then he found the lump…. A few weeks later the tests showed thyroid cancer.

The Healing Path, Marc Ian Barasch

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