In the weeks before treatment began, I had a dream. This is the dream:

It’s the middle of the night and the house is asleep. Kathleen is beside me and I am sleeping lightly enough that I hear the sounds of footsteps outside our door. I open my eyes to see who is moving about and see a large black sort of oval rectangular mass with irregular edges like feather texture on top of two legs walk into the bedroom that Ian and Connor used to share. I think to myself, “Who left the door open downstairs so that could get in here?” I lean over to Kathleen and tell her to keep her eyes shut no matter what she hears and I head into the bedroom next to ours to confront whatever is in there. It’s big. Bigger than me. It’s not human. It’s kind of like an ostrich body on top of two large, non-ostrich legs. It’s moving throughout the room. It doesn’t come at me, so I just position and reposition my body to guide it out of the room and it walks out the door. Which would be good except it takes a right turn and goes straight into the bedroom where Kathleen is on the bed with her eyes shut. The darn thing walks over to the bed, climbs on, and starts stepping around on the bed. Kathleen starts to scream. I call out to Aidan and he comes to the room to help. I tell him he needs to help me get this thing out of here and working together we position our bodies to guide it out of the room. It works and the figure moves out of the room. I follow it down the stairs and into the dining room and escort it out of our home through the open door.

Back to real life. I awoke the next morning with no memory of the dream until about an hour later when I was talking to Kathleen or maybe it was her sister Bridget. But they said something and the whole dream came back to me in an instant. Completely forgetting or completely ignoring whatever we were talking about I told her the details of the dream right that second.

Kathleen and I had been reading Radical Remission chapter two about trusting your instincts and your intuition just a day or two before. In that chapter, the author referenced the calm of the dream state as a place to listen to yourself and find guidance. I connected those dots right away and said, “That big feathered mass is cancer. And we just have to escort it out.” I’ve been saying that ever since. “We just have to escort it out.”

One could stop right there. Or one could read deep into the dream looking for meaning in the details. I said to my brother, “How much do you want to bet that the shape of that mass on top of the legs looks exactly like the CT scan of the tumor in my lung?” It seemed bigger than me. It was frightening to Kathleen. It took additional family support to get it out. It included the unanswered question of who left the door open that let it in in the first place, which doesn’t really matter once it’s already in. And there was no fight. I just had to escort it out.

And thus a cancer eradication strategy was born.