THE DREAM I was in a hospital room. I wasn't sick. I was just moving around cleaning, helping out. It seemed like I was a type of volunteer or something. There was a man in a bed. He was probably in his mid 30s. He looked healthy but was wearing a hospital gown. At the end of the room there were 3 people watching and crying. They were obviously his family. A nurse came into the room. The man started struggling and crying out that he didn't want to die. The nurse silently walked to him and injected a substance into his IV I stood there shocked watching this. I started yelling that they were putting him down l ike a dog. The nurse turned to me and said, very coldly, "he's only going to die anyway"; I ran to him to stop her and tripped and fell. I fell at the end of the bed and the next thing I knew I was covered in a warm liquid. I looked up and saw I was completely covered in his excrement! His bowls and bladder had let go all over me at the end of the bed. I just kept screaming "you killed him. Why? Why did you kill him" His family just sat in the corner and cried and cried. Then I woke up.

GUESSWORK The dreamer was a volunteer who was teaching a 42 year old illiterate man how to read. The lessons had been going so well that she had won an award for it. On the evening of the dream she had just finished an exhausting session with him. She had been thinking a lot about him recently about how he had put his faith in her.

The "Guesswork" stage of interpreting a dream involves spotting issues likely to cause dreams. For help with this click here

ASSOCIATIONS AND SYMBOLIC MEANINGS
1. Beds often link to very personal things. The dreamer had got very close to the man that she was helping to read and write. She had gained an insight to how he was thinking and feeling.
2. Hospitals are often about helping heal people in emotional ways. The dreamer was helping to build the man's self esteem.
3. The dream features a man being put down like a dog. It links in to the kind of inhumane treatment that he received. He had been "treated like a dog by society".4. Excrement could represent years of frustration. He had been treated badly by society for years. Now he was letting all that frustration go in one burst.

DREAM ANALYSIS In guesswork the dream was linked to relationship that the dreamer had with a man she was teaching to read and write. Its easy to see how the dream deals with the following themes:
- The years of bad treatment the man had received
- improving self esteem
- treating someone like a dog

If you weave together the different themes then you find that the dream could easily capture this following thought that the dreamer felt -"I have been helping a man to learn to read and write. I think he is so grateful. For years he has been put down and no one has believed in him. Its like all the bad emotions emotions have been stored up. I am opening the flood gates."