Hi. I have three friends who have all been diagnosed with cancer at different times within the last three years. Gary was first to be diagnosed, and died about a year and a half ago. Mike was then diagnosed and he just passed this past Jan. Mary was diagnosed just a year ago and now she is dying. Mary told me she was so afraid b/c she was certain she is next, which, even to me, was the next logical step. I tried to console her best I could, but no words could take away her fear. A few weeks after Mike's death, I had a dream, that has had me on edge ever since. Here it is:

I was to help babysit this child with the help of about 6 or 7 other people. Each of us had a time slot of when we would be watching the child. We were all given a piece of paper with all our names on it, with our time to be with the child. As I looked at the paper I noticed that all the letters of everybody's name spelled out a distinguishable word; for example, the first name was, say, Cathy, then the next was Ken. Take CA from Cathy and then KE from Ken and it spells CAKE. Anyway, it all made sense until I got to my name. Someone named Mike was above my name and no matter how I tried to make a word out of our names, it didn't work. So I raised the paper up in the air and said, "Wait a minute. This doesn't make any sense. I can't be after Mike." Everyone ignored me, so I kept yelling it out, "I can't be after Mike! It makes no sense!" I turned and saw my mother behind me (who is still alive, btw) and said, "Look, mom. They made a mistake. I can't be after Mike." She just looked at the paper, then back at me, w/o saying a word. So, I yelled again. "This is wrong!" So someone, I guess the person who made up the list, came to me, took the paper from my hand, looked at it, and said, "No, this is right. You're after Mike." I woke up from that dream with the words, "This makes no sense. I cannot be after Mike," ringing so loudly in my head, that I said it out loud.

Now I haven't been diagnosed with anything life threatening. Yes, I've been thinking about the thought of death much more so now that 3 of my friends have recently died, but if I were to take the message literally, it wouldn't make any sense if I were next. Could it be that death has been just so close to me these last few years, that I'm thinking of my own death? Still, that dream was very disturbing to me.

Any ideas what it could mean, other than I'm next to go?

I think you are right, that death has been so prominant in your life recently that it's appearing in your dreams like this. In fact it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often. I think you are lucky in a way that you do remember your dreams (lots of people don't) in that you get sort of an extra life to mull this stuff over in your mind, which often helps even if it is kind of scary at the time.

You are bound to wonder, both while asleep and awake, if you're the next to go under the circumstances. It's natural human reasoning, but it certainly does not mean it's going to happen.