Here is this morning’s dream.

The dream opens with me sat in an office, part real estate part solicitor. I am sat the other side of the desk to the person whose office it is. He is checking with me if I made inquiries into land titles. He has a mild Aussie accent. I say that yes I made an online inquiry into land to which my father once held title at the Queensland registry office a while back. He says that they are sorry that the search took so long but they are following up on two properties one in the Cairns area and one in Brisbane. He asks to see some identification documents which I show him. He says that he will get back to me soon. He thinks that the Cairns property might still belong to our family.

The scene changes and I am in an ultra modern hospital facility sat in a technical chair. I am with a young male doctor and a young female doctor. They are both wearing lab coats. Together with them is a technician. We are speaking in a mixture of French and English moving between according to our availability of vocabulary. We are in France. They are testing the function of my right lung only. I am being asked to exhale only from that lung and to cough only from that lung. I do this and they are very surprised at the result the lung is functioning way better than they thought. I am coughing up a clear white sputum which they suck with vacuum into a jar. I explain that I have not been coughing much because of the opium painkiller I am taking. They say it is time to take a break for lunch and that they will continue with the left lung later. In the meantime they ask if I will do an ecological survey of the island upon which the hospital finds itself. The hospital is on a hillock reached by a causeway well into a lake. It is a bit like a castle in construction.

I step out of the hospital and into the wooded hillock. They are particularly interested in the fox population. Because I am so quiet I do not disturb the foxes. I come upon one after the other who have demarcated their terrain, their patch, with droppings. I know that they have done this to prevent conflict. I count foxes noting their state of health and big fluffy tails. They are all well. I go down the hillside towards the water and am joined by the ninth fox who trots along by me. He is escorting me off the island and into the water. As I near the water we are charged by a manky tatty old billy goat. I grab him by the horns and lead him into the lake. He continues to try to butt me. But I swim out with the goat by his horns until he is out of his depth. The fox watches on. The goats swims back to land. I swim around the island to where the causeway joins the hospital and there is a small quay and entrance door into the hospital. I am cold from the water and knock the door. A health assistant helps me up and in. She offers me a towel. I come into the building and pick up a brown chocolatey drink from the vending machine. She directs me back to the clinic.

I arrive back and sit in the chair where I am joined by the doctors. They try my drink and like it. I explain that I got it from the vending machine at lake level. I comment that the fox population looks well and healthy. They are now going to start on my left lung. They want to know where to forward the results to. I say that I will be in Switzerland and we can find a Francophone hospital for them to forward my results to. I suggest Fribourg because that is just over the language frontier. There is a CHU (centre hospitalier universitaire) there. I ask them to put Bern into Google maps so that we can look for other French speaking hospitals. I see the large CHU at Bern on the map and say that they will speak French English and German there so there is probably no need to find a specifically French hospital. The young female doctor concurs. She is happy to send her write up to Bern which I can see from the map is quite close to where I live in the city. She says that she had a friend in Geneva and visited Bern a number of times.

The dream ends and I think, “well, the medical theme is not surprising given what is scheduled.”