The Lady with the List
Begin: I had been driving the 3.8 Jaguar sedan, and had encountered some minor problems. I had it parked beside the curb on a residential street and was making adjustments.
A woman entered the dream holding some papers. She showed me a health check list with items in three columns, each with a check off box next to it. Nearly all the boxes were empty. She said, "You have been claiming you are in perfect health, but you check positive for heart problems".
I replied, "Yes, but I have known about that and it's well under control, almost gone".
She turned the page and added, "You also check positive for leukemia".
I greeted that statement with surprise, and replied, "Well, I guess I'll have to take care of that". With this I awoke instantly.
End.
I was very impressed that the woman did not seem to be part of the dream. She was more vivid and more alive, superimposed over a paler background.
This dream had a very strong impact on my waking life, especially since I had been feeling run down for many months for no particular reason. I had already cleaned up my diet greatly because I had suspected some mild heart problems. These had already faded considerably. Now I added other corrective actions, shifting from protein consciouness to vitamin and mineral conciousness, and further reducing sugar to about 5% of the normal American intake. I also began working to increase my internal energy. By time I first organized my notes for this period, in late June 1979, I felt in much better condition.
Somewhere around this time I had started on a vegetarian diet, though this dream may have come after it was started, because I remember the trigger for that to be different. My vegetarian period lasted for a number of years. My only significant violation was an occasional jar of pickled pig feet. My vegetarian period did not reach the average of 7 years for most vegetarians before falling off the wagon.
Early in my vegetarian period, when this probably was, I was very protein conscious, because the recommended amount of protein seemed almost impossible to reach on a vegetarian diet. Not long after, this recommendation was judged to be dangerously high (probably paid for by the meat industry) and greatly reduced, making vegetarianism much more practical.