to go to medical school and become a psychiatrist. With an M.D., I will have the credibility to continue my psychic work. I feel like a secret agent who has just been given a special assignment. How can I refuse? The words seem so right, I never once think to question them.
I woke at dawn, puzzled, remembering this dream in detail. Although I had accepted it with ease, the message made no sense to me now. My head was spinning. There must have been some mistake. Me, a psychiatrist? Unbelievable. I just wasn't the type. I might as well have heard that I was going to be shot out of a cannon into another galaxy. I felt like the object of some bad practical joke, that any minute someone was going to jump out from behind the curtains and burst out laughing.
As the daughter of two physicians, it might have seemed logical that I would consider following in their footsteps, but I had never shown the slightest interest. My parents, wanting to point me in a reasonable direction while I was still in high school, had sent me to a private psychologist in Beverly Hills for career counseling. She handed me a pile of tests filled with questions, each one more meaningless than the next: Do you like gardening? Do you get along with other people? Do you like working with your hands?
I took the questionnaires home and labored over them for eight hours. After they were scored, the psychologist and I went over the results. “Whatever you do,” she advised, “don't ever go into medicine, counseling, or any of the helping professions. Your aptitude in these areas is far too low. You'd be happier and more successful in a career in the arts.”
I wasn't surprised. At that time in my life, the thought of dealing with illness or listening to somebody else's problems all day long held no appeal for me. I had enough problems of my own. Furthermore, most of my parents' friends were doctors, so I'd been around them all my life. They'd never really interested me; I had little in common with them. My friends were artists; the more eccentric and far out the better. And I too wanted to become an artist of some kind.
But while I lay in bed, the dream gnawed at me. I couldn't go back to sleep. Throwing on my favorite green sweater and an old pair of sweatpants, I took off for a coffee shop on the Venice boardwalk. Except for a waitress who was cleaning up behind the counter, the place was still empty. I slid into a corner booth. Watching the joggers and street people pass by, I let the dream sink in. I'd learned enough at the lab to know better than to ignore such a clear message, even though it seemed so fat-fetched.
Listening to old fifties songs on the juke box and sipping strong coffee, I sat there for hours, thinking. Even if I wanted to, would I be able to follow the guidance in the dream? I wasn't sure. Finally, after much deliberation, I reached an agreement with myself that I thought I could live with: I would enroll in Santa Monica Junior College, take one class, and see how it went. That was the most I could promise. I hadn't been to school for almost three years, and although I'd always done well with a minimum of work, I didn't miss it. No matter how absurd this new plan sounded to me, I was now committed to giving it a try.
The fall semester, which began in mid-September, happened to be a few weeks away. But I was registering late, so most of the classes were already full. One of the last choices was meteorology. Totally uninterested in the subject, I enrolled anyway, certain my experiment was doomed.
I couldn't have been more wrong. I quickly found that I was moved by the beauty of how rain was made, how clouds were formed, the way weather happened. Something inside me responded, and in this unlikely setting I discovered that school wasn't so alien after all. When it was over, I registered in more classes. And so the cycle began.
Nine months after the first meteorology class, as I sat on my living room floor typing up an English term
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