I'm a nurse and I've been involved in street related healthcare probably since…well, actually since the mid to late 1990s. And I’ve been here [at Moss Park] since we started as a tent in the park. I'm an OG. I'm old [laughs].

I sleep well. I think that there's a couple of things that I have found [that interrupt it]. Some of it is aging—I have to wake up to go to the bathroom, which disrupts my sleep. And it's hard to go back into a good sleep after that. So that is one piece.

I have become hypervigilant over the last number of years. I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but I discovered that I slept better when there was white noise in my room. I had issues with breathing and the doctor had suggested running a humidifier. The noise of the humidifier improved my sleep (but not the breathing condition), so now I literally have a fish tank about two feet from my bed with a loud bubbler. It probably would drive many people crazy [laughs]. But it's loud enough that I don't hear a lot of other things, so it tends to make me less hypervigilant. And it has a light, so I sleep with a light on now too. I’ve had the same lovely partner for 26 years and he is very patient with my loud bubbler and my light [laughs].

I was a prolific daydreamer as a kid. I grew up on a farm. Lots of hours to daydream while you're picking beans, driving a tractor. Seriously. Lots of hours. I picked a lot of beans. I don't really remember a lot of dreams, but I remember a lot of daydreaming. Using that to escape and imagine life beyond beans, beans [laughs].

In the last few weeks, [my dream life] has been very active. I feel like it kind of ebbs and flows, probably like most peoples. For the last few weeks. I've had a lot of feeling like, “Wow, there’s been a lot of dreaming going on.”

Often there's a sense of needing to move house. I think it's the same house every time, but it's not a house that I know in my current life. It's big. It's old. It has a bajillion rooms that I keep finding things in. Sometimes it's that my parents are needing to be moved out of it 'cause they're moving into a senior's place, which has happened recently in the real world. And sometimes it's my house that I'm selling or sometimes it’s…there's just a lot of things around this house. Some of it's good and some of it is stressful. Like, “Don't go in that room! There might be rodents!” Or leaking water, you know, whatever. Just kind of like weird house things, moving house things.

And numbers. I don't know where the numbers are coming from. [But] the numbers often come almost as if they're a way of shifting [the dream]. I don't know if that makes any sense. I used to do Sudoku when I was stressed out, to kind of clear my mind before I would sleep. So, I don't know if that's why.

When [the dreams] start getting hyper, then sometimes I'll just go into these numbers. Oh, and another thing about it is it feels like nobody can hear me. So, I'm often yelling. Literally yelling. My daughter and my husband are waking me up 'cause I'm yelling to warn people that, like, there was a coyote outside the garage. Nobody could hear me, so I was screaming, “Don't! Mom's sitting in a wheelchair and there's a coyote right there! Don't let it in!” You know, those kind things.

Nobody is hearing me in the dream, so I’m screaming, but then it tends to slide into, “You can't say your age as 55, you have to say your age as two numbers.” So, I'm like, “four plus one, and three plus two.” Literally, this is my dream the other night: “Seven is the only number under ten that is not divided by any other number under ten or multiplied by any other number under ten whose rate score is less than ten, not counting one.” It went on for ages, this dream. And yet somehow it was a really comforting dream. Even as I'm dreaming it, I'm thinking, “This is great. This is just numbers. So, nothing is gonna be scary in this dream.”

Many years ago, I used to do stuff with guys that had been released from prison and were mandated for anger management. And one of the things that they talked about in prepping them for court was numbers. Because if the judge or the crown's questions were provoking them, [the idea was] to get them to [stay] calm in their heads by doing simple arithmetic. Because often it was enough to deescalate. It didn't always work 'cause people weren't always able to follow through with it. But that sense of, “Okay, take a deep breath and count to ten, or one plus one is two, two plus two is four.” They did that for like 30 seconds before the answer. It looked to the judge like they were giving a thoughtful answer. And it was also not just a scream back at the crown. So, that’s a piece of it, I guess. [A way to] calm myself down in my sleep. Yeah.

Before COVID, I didn't remember my dreams. I would wake up and I'd think, “Oh, that was interesting.” But I can't tell you what it was. Whereas now, starting somewhere in COVID, I started to wake up and be like, “Whoa, I'm tired. That was a busy night.” Or, “I'm really glad to be awake.”

I started having these dreams in COVID—vivid dreams—that I'd given people the wrong vaccine. Or that there was just a ton of like disagreement about it. You remember the Covid vaccine era – people wanting it and public health yelling at us if we wasted a dose. “You've opened the vial, you gotta get rid of it.” And then yelling at us because it was only meant for people over a certain age. And you gave it to a 46-year-old and it was really only meant for people over 50. Or you gave it to this 25-year-old, and it's like, “He was a frontline worker in a grocery store and I was gonna throw it in the garbage otherwise.” In my dreams, that 25-year-old dies ‘cause I gave him a vaccine that was really meant for somebody over 50 – even though they were all the same vaccine [in real life]. But in my dreams, that made no logical sense.

I remember having to wake myself up somehow and talk myself out of it. It was stupid in retrospect. My manager thought it was nuts. “Why are you obsessing about these vaccines?” And I was like, “I don't know. It wakes me up in the middle of the night and I'm on these crazy dreams.” And so, I feel like ever since then…I don't know if it was just such a high alert time, but it really hasn't come down [laughs]. It really hasn't come down. Well, maybe it has a little, but I don't know that it has a lot.

I feel like I was having these dreams during COVID because we were having so much death. So much death. There'd be days that would go by in this building where it felt like every day somebody we knew was dead. Another person we knew was dead every single day. And I would have these dreams where it felt like Sarah and all the other staff, we were literally human break-walls. We were standing in water, deep water that was just like blowing us away and we were trying to stay standing. I don't know why we were all in water and what we were trying to do because it didn't seem like we're actually doing anything other than being in this water, trying to survive. But that sense of the waves, the intensity of the waves…

There is no rational way to explain what life is like in this context to people. And so it's gotta go somewhere. I don't know. I think that being here, being part of this community, which is incredible and amazing privilege to be part of. I remember years ago, one of the staff was really frustrated because her doctor kept wanting to give her an antidepressant. And she kept saying, “I don't need an antidepressant. I am grieving because so many people that I care about are dead. And I'm sad and I'm grieving, but that's a normal response to a catastrophic scenario. It's not that I'm depressed.” And I feel like that's true for me in some ways, too.

And I feel like there's been an uptick of people that I used to work with saying to me: “Don't do this stuff anymore.” Or people that are in my life saying to me, “Just quit. It's too hard.” Or “You've worked there long enough. Go get a job in healthcare somewhere else.” And I feel like the ability to talk about what happens here has decreased in the rest of the world. The willingness for the rest of my world—my social network—to listen without being dismissive. Not my husband. Not my kids. They're very good. But even there, I feel like I edit a lot because I don't want everything to just be about this corner of the world. It's not everybody's corner of the world. And the more that I've edited out, the more my dream life has become chaotic.

I have one recurring dream: There's a set of logs. They're large, like a climbing structure for kids, large logs in a triangle. They were in my elementary school when I was a kid. That’s the setting, in Northern Ontario, but for some reason, there's a tiger there too, which wasn't in my schoolyard. And it's like this dream that never seems to end. And this tiger is after us. It keeps coming back, going around and around and over and in through these logs. It's always the same brother. I have three brothers, but it's always the same brother [in this dream]. And there’s always a tiger. And, and somehow it never feels completely terrifying. It just always feels like we have to work hard to stay ahead of it. It happens a lot.

I associate it with family stress. This is the brother that…[laughs]. I moved to Romania. He showed up there on vacation and hung out for a long time. I moved back. He went to McGill. He moved back and I went to Montreal. We both are married to Asian partners and we both have girls about the same age, and he's the only other sibling in Toronto. Everybody else is all over North America. So, we do tend to live life kind of in parallel to one another. He calls me Bud. He's seven years older than I am, but we have done much of life—survived and celebrated—together. So, I would assume that's partly why he's the one in the dream with me. But I'm not really sure about what the other things are. Like, it's not easy figuring out [how to escape the tiger], but it’s also not terrifying. Like, I'm not waking up screaming. There's nothing that's sad and there's nobody else around. It's like we're in my elementary school year. And the tiger is straight out of Calvin and Hobbes [laughs]. It’s smart.

I don't dream anything that's specific to [Moss Park]. Well, that's not true. I do have people in my dreams from here… Oh, now I can tell you what last night's dream was: There was a stabbing. [The dream] was looking toward this shift today, [and there was a] stabbing tonight on the sidewalk. I was holding somebody's guts and trying to block the knife from moving while Mike was helping me to get gloves on and not letting anybody else come out the front door so nobody would step on him. So, they all had to go around the side and Noel was getting me a blood pressure cuff and an oxygen tank.

I'll have dreams like that sometimes. And they are not ever typically things that I've dealt with here [at Moss Park]. We've had people stabbed at the front door, but it's not like this dream, where it was a big machete knife, a way over the top kind of thing. But I'll have those [kinds of] dreams and I will be very directive in those dreams. And they will kind of then peter out at some point. They're just sort of done. And I don't even know what happened. I don't know if that person survived. I don't know anything.

A particular guy who used to be very much part of this community that died last year—young kid—he lived in an alternate reality, and was also incredibly lovely and kind and sweet, although occasionally would get lost in another world and then he'd need to be barred for a bit because he was just not safe. I dreamt that he was gonna die. He did. But that's not unusual in this community. So, I don't think it was my dream, but I would dream over and over and over that Sarah and I, or Mary, Paul, and I (she was a nurse that used work here) found him in the alley. And I'd be dreaming of his overdoses—overdoses that didn't happen with him. Overdoses that potentially could have happened with him, or anybody else because they were kind of typical bad overdoses of found people. But I would dream it. And it was often him. It was almost always him in the dream.

A number of years ago here, there was a really, really, mentally ill woman. And it was end of night and she wouldn't leave. She wouldn't leave. She wouldn't leave. And then she took a syringe full of fentanyl and she tried to stab me with it. I thought I might die. I thought I would overdose because I don't have any tolerance to fentanyl. And all the staff I was working with were brand new. And I was thinking, “Oh, good grief.” It actually was enough that we shifted some of our training protocol. Like if a staff member gets injected, we do “X.” And for a bit, I dreamt a lot about that scenario. It was always trying to figure out ways off… She didn't get me. She ended up sitting down and somebody else took the syringe. And she got it into herself, actually, and she overdosed badly. So, it would've killed me or potentially killed me. But those dreams just kept circulating back for a bit. And it wasn't necessarily even her, but it was that, like that kind of story.

[These dreams] are often the more exaggerated parts of work. But I don't wake up screaming. Even in the dream [with the stabbing], I remember at one point the dream I was trying to get somebody to find the 4x4s in the clinic room. I couldn't leave the guts—the stomach of the guy—to go find them. At one point I had this lovely pile of 4x4s around the, the knife so I wouldn't cut myself, and then I was like, “Oh, shoot, they're gonna stick to the belly, to the open gut.” And so, I was getting them to bring me saline to soak that. But then I thought, what I should have done was use a BD pad from the Go Bag. So, I re-did the dream. And then another re-do. There was the third re-do where we wrapped the knife with a blue pad to make sure nobody got caught as we were trying to stabilize it, you know? It wasn't terrifying, it was problem solving. Bizarre problem solving.

I love this place. I mean, I love this place for lots of reasons, but I also feel like this is a place that does community fairly well. You can come here sad, you can come here happy, you can come here broken, or excited, or over the moon. And people take care of you. It's a good place to be. I feel able to come and grieve here even when it's not something that affects this community. I had a niece that committed suicide a few years ago, and I felt like this was like the safest place to bring that grief to. This was a community that understood grief and understood suicide. And it wasn't shameful or an, “Oh my goodness!” kind of thing, you know? It's an amazing gift to be part of this place. And it's not all heavy and crazy. I feel like I'm giving you all these heavy, crazy parts. It's not all heavy and crazy. Some of it's really pretty wonderful. And the ability to do both. Do you know Ecclesiastes from the Bible? I love the poetry of some of it: “There’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” And you really feel that in this community.