Healing Radioactive Burns with Avocado Smash

What else does your dreaming brain cook up?

There’s nothing like the brain being active at night that generates something far more creative, weird, and unpredictable than anything you’d create in daylit hours. Following my previous dream series, here’s my current wild journey involving: radioactive waste, avocado smash, and my biggest fears.

Please heed the numerous disclaimers that some of the claims made in this dream story are absolutely not true and are a product of my brain randomly firing and somehow making the random concepts “make sense”.

The Intern Job

In this dream, I was an intern for a nuclear plant. On my first day of work, I was tasked to get rid of some of this radioactive waste with my supervisor and his assistant.

To do this, we hauled 10kg bags of what looked like almond flour into the trunk of the car, so that we could drive it to the safe site for burying.

This is an important disclaimer that I know absolutely nothing about nuclear processes or radioactivity but I’m pretty sure that radioactive waste doesn’t look like almond flour nor is transported by humans in a Honda Civic to another site.

We ran out of room in the trunk, so my supervisor decided to just store one of the bags in the backseats, where I was sitting. I protested, but he waved it off and told me that they do this all the time and nothing bad has ever happened.

Being an intern with little to no power, and partially hoping that he was right after all and not wanting to add complications to a seemingly smooth process, I got into the car with the 10kg bag of radioactive almond flour for the journey.

BUT…

“It’s Fine” he said

It wasn’t five minutes before we realized that the bag we’d loaded into the backseat had actually gotten a tiny puncture at some point, and was starting to rip into a larger hole.

Soon, the radioactive almond flour was all over the backseats and all over me, but as I panicked, my supervisor chuckled at my newbie panic and just told me to shove the radioactive material back in the bag. He tried to be comforting:

“It’s fine, it’s happened before and no one’s ever reacted to it.”

Narrator voice: it was not fine.

I bit my tongue, wondering if my anxiety was just overreacting to panic.

Soon though, I felt hot all over, with rashes covering my arms and legs. I screamed and they turned around immediately. My supervisor pulled over so we could deal with the panic.

Oh shit, this has never happened before. We’d better get you to the hospital.

So I thought, for safety reasons, maybe the assistant would take me to the hospital and the supervisor would go on his merry way to safely deliver the radioactive almond flour to the dumpsite, or vice versa, but no.

We drove right to the hospital, and they left this leaking radioactive material right in the parking lot, under the hot sun.

I felt guilty and wondered for a brief moment whether this would affect others who might walk too close, park too close to the car, but the rashes were spreading and so the thought briefly fled my mind.

The waiting room

Given the radioactive nature of the source of the rash, I was immediately secluded into an area away from everyone else. The only person in the room was a young woman.

As we waited, I noted that she was creating these gorgeous study notes that had colour-coded headers and gorgeous washi tape sections. I was pleasantly distracted from my rashes and shared that I loved her notes. She thanked me and said:

I’m a first-year med student, what year are you in?

I told her I was in the third year of my PhD in psychology and she immediately turned, nose wrinkled in disgust and said:

That’s not a real degree.*

*Disclaimer: No actual med student or human being has actually said that to me so I’m not even sure where this is from. Maybe it’s what’s left behind from those haughty Tinder men who told me I wasn’t smart or beautiful enough for them, should I not respond to their message within 0.2 seconds. As much as I try to believe that they didn’t leave any imprint on me, maybe those words bounced around in my brain until they settled into some dusty corner of my mind.

I opened my mouth to protest when the doctor walked in and said to her:

You can wrap up early here, we don’t have anyone other than this patient and I can handle it.

The student hopped to leave and the doctor turned to me to gather the information. She was kind, assuring that she knew exactly what needed to be done.

She disappeared and returned with smashed avocado* in a wooden bowl, and had me hold out my arms until she smothered the entire surface area with a generous layer of what looked like spiceless guacamole.

*Disclaimer: I shouldn’t have to say it but clearly this is not true 😅

The relief was instant. I was grateful.

My biggest fear

My biggest fear in all of this was after I was dismissed from the doc’s room, back into the waiting room. I knew my partner was waiting to pick me up, but that my boss and his assistant were also in the waiting room.

Side note: and that the car with the radioactive almond flour was still in the parking lot???

If I couldn’t do the first task that was assigned to me, which was to transport said radioactive almond flour to the dumpsite, even when I wasn’t the only one doing it, how was I to survive the rest of the job?

If I was allergic to this stuff, I couldn’t possibly tackle this job even if I tried.

I had to quit.

I had to let someone down.

Somehow, even after these people ignored all of the safety protocols that landed me into a hospital, my biggest fear was letting them down.

I woke up before I had to quit. So who knows if I ever did?

Summary of disclaimers:

• This is absolutely not how radioactive waste works
• Med students are usually super nice and no one, save some haughty Tinder men, have actually said that degrees in psychology don’t matter.
• Avocado smash does not cure radioactive burns.

Anyways, let me know what your wildest dream ever has been!

Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) should start a dream journal. That is all.

Shouting out Dennett’s piece! 👇