The Dream That Felt Too Real

This morning, I had a dream unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.It was so vivid, so intense, that for a moment I wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a message.

I was driving home, heavy eyed, drifting between exhaustion and awareness. I don’t remember the moment it happened… only the feeling of everything going dark. When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital. Pain tore through my body,sharp, overwhelming, unbearable. I tried to move but my limbs felt like stone. I drifted back into sleep.

The next moment, I rose from the bed effortlessly;no pain, no weakness. I felt lighter than ever, almost peaceful. Then I turned… and saw myself lying there.

A still version of me.

A silent body I no longer belonged to.

I stepped outside the room and saw my wife. My son. My world. They didn’t see me. I watched them from the doorway.My heart straining in a way no physical body ever could.

Suddenly, scenes flashed before me like chapters flipping too fast.

Moments I should have lived but never did.

Mistakes I made when I knew better.

A thousand little regrets whispering at once.

Then I saw something even harder.My family moving on.

The pain..then the healing.

The sorrow,then the acceptance.

The tears..Then slowly over time, their laughter returning.

Their lives continued, even without me. And that broke me in ways I can’t put into words but seeing them happy in the end made me emotionless. Maybe it was finally my time… or at least that’s how it felt.

Maybe this was how it felt for countless souls before me, in the quiet moment when they slipped away from this world.

In that strange space between life and something beyond it, a question formed inside me.

Should I go back?

Should I fight my way back into that broken body and wake up?

Or…

Should I stay in this soft, warm, eternal peace where nothing hurts?

As I stood there, torn between worlds, a bright light washed over everything.It was gentle, endless and that was when I finally woke up.

But the question stayed with me.

If this happened in real life, which would I choose?

Which should anyone choose?

What would you choose?

The peace… or the people?

From Bangladesh Medical College to Malaysian Private Practice

It was 5.16AM when my phone vibrated;too early for any good news. A message from my staff flashed across the screen: “Dr, I can’t make it today. My sister got admitted.”

I stared at it for a moment, half-asleep, half-stressed, and yet fully aware of what that meant for the next 16 hours. She was the one covering the whole day. My fingers typed only one word: “Okay.”

Maybe I should have said more, maybe I should have asked how her sister was doing, but my brain froze. When you run a clinic like this,short staffed and overstretched,empathy sometimes hides behind exhaustion.

By 5.45AM, I was already on the road. The streetlights were still glowing, the sky still holding on to the last shade of night. I reached the clinic around 6.20AM. We only open at 8AM, but this has been my routine for the past three months.Arriving before dawn just to escape the jam, parking under the same building, waiting inside the car with the engine humming like a tired heartbeat.

Every morning feels like a quiet negotiation with myself: How long more can I keep doing this? How long before something inside me gives up?

As the minutes pass, the silence of the early morning pulls me back into my memories,back to my college days in Bangladesh.

There was a time, years ago, when life felt heavy but much simpler. I remember walking through the campus streets in Bangladesh with my backpack slung over one shoulder. The corridors carried the lingering smell of chewed paan that patients spat on the floor, and yet I held on to that stubborn belief that the future would be bright no matter how tough the present was.

Bangladesh was chaotic.

Bangladesh was loud.

Bangladesh was dirty.

But my heart… my heart was lighter then.

I remember walking through the hospital corridors where patients slept on the floor because there were no beds. Men recovering from surgeries lying on torn blankets. Women sitting with their babies on cold tiles.

The OT itself was nothing like what we romanticised during first year. It was cramped, ventilation was questionable, and sometimes you had to scrub in while stepping over puddles from a leaking ceiling. The instruments weren’t shiny; the air wasn’t sterile. The power would cut halfway during a procedure, and the generator would kick in with a roar that made everyone laugh instead of panic.

But in that chaos, life felt meaningful.

We used to take case histories from patients lying in corridors, not beds. We sat beside them, cross-legged on the floor, and they told us their stories with gratitude in their eyes.Gratitude for us, the students who could do nothing but listen. That kind of appreciation… you don’t see it often anymore.

Even the mortuary had its own strange poetry. Bodies kept at room temperature, fat saponification creating a smell so strong you’d lose your appetite for days. But we still stood there, masks too thin, stomachs too sensitive, hearts too innocent,believing that this was the price for a brighter future.

Back then, everything looked colourful from the outside.

We believed once we graduated, once we wore the white coat, the world would change.

We would change.

But the dream blurred when I entered KKM.

I thought it would be structured, respectful, professional. Instead, it was political, exhausting, and often cruel. Some days I felt more like a machine than a doctor. Nothing prepared me for the toxicity, the pressure, the way your spirit slowly gets eaten away behind fluorescent lights and endless queues.

Cases never ended, shifts never ended, expectations never ended. You were either burnt out or burning out slowly. Somewhere in those long nights and chaotic days, the version of me who once believed everything would be colourful slowly faded.

Now I’m in private practice, and yes,life is different. The rules are different, the responsibilities heavier, and the pressure more personal. Here, everything falls on you. Staff issues, patient complaints, monthly sales, endless decisions that affect people’s lives and your own sanity. No one prepares you for this side of medicine.

But the struggle?

It still follows me like a shadow.

These early mornings in the car, these silent hours where I question my own limits, these unexpected messages at 5AM..They all remind me that adulthood is nothing like what we imagined in medical college.

Yet, somewhere inside, that same stubborn student from Bangladesh still whispers, Hold on. Something better is coming.

Because maybe that’s what keeps us going.Not the reality we face every day, but the tiny hope that tomorrow might be different. And maybe, one day, this routine, this stress, this loneliness in the car before sunrise… will become just another story I survived. 

The Next Project

Unlike most medical students, my journey was never filled with carefree laughter, midnight mamak sessions, or the kind of memories people proudly call the best days of their life.

My phase was different.Darker, heavier, nothing like the ordinary college stories everyone else seems to have.

I still remember this exact date, thirteen years ago.I had flown back to Malaysia for the holidays.Those few days were the last time my life felt steady, peaceful, almost cinematic. The kind of days where everything falls into place without you even noticing. I didn’t know then that I was standing at the edge of a cliff, moments away from a fall that would change everything.

Because the moment I returned,chaos followed.

Life didn’t just shift;it flipped.

The things I used to watch only in movies suddenly became my reality.

Fear became a roommate.

Uncertainty became a routine.

Strength was no longer a choice ;it was survival.

And if I had to list down everything that happened in the next eight years..I wouldn’t know where to begin in fact it could put me in troubles. There were too many chapters, too many storms, too many nights where I questioned everything ;myself, my dreams, even my purpose and the reason of being alive.

With all the chaos and unspoken dramas swirling around my life, came that day,that one afternoon that would silently change everything. I already sensed I had done something terrible the night before.The way the Bengali students stared at me as I walked through the corridor said enough. Their silence was louder than any accusation. That morning, I woke up still in my scrubs,the smell of antiseptic clinging to my skin, my mind completely blank. I couldn’t recall a single thing from the night before.

Then I saw him, the junior Dr I had spent countless nights with in OT.For eighteen months, the operating theatre had become my second home. I was there almost every night, cutting, suturing, handling tissues from skin all the way to ligaments in ortho cases, initially under supervision. 

Nobody questioned me. They all thought I was a resident and in that world, assumptions were enough to turn fiction into reality.

He looked at me with a quiet understanding, the kind only someone who had watched me work for months could have. He knew my fascination with forensic pathology. And that day, a new case had arrived.

Without a word, he gestured for me to follow him to the mortuary to make me feel better. The moment I stepped into that warm room, time slowed. Mortuary in Bangladesh was very different from Malaysia back then. Bodies were left at normal room temperature before autopsy and the fat saponification created awful smell .One so strong that you couldn't swallow food for the next few days. 

Even now, the images remain painfully vivid.

She was young.

Too young.

A girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen. Her body carrying the brutal story of what had been done to her. Bite marks. Disfigured limbs. Bruises in places no one should ever touch. It was a horror I had only ever seen in films, suddenly lying in front of me, real and irreversible.

That was the moment everything inside me shifted.

Many people could become the hallmark of healthcare, treat illnesses, mend wounds, cure diseases.

But my heart wanted something different.

I wanted to stand for safety, for justice, for the protection of people before they reached a table like this. I wanted to change the system, not just work inside it.

But when I returned to Malaysia and entered its healthcare system, the dream slowly dissolved.The politics, the exhaustion, the toxicity… it dimmed me. The environment was suffocating enough to bury even the brightest ambitions. 

Day by day, the fire faded.

Until eventually, the dream became a whisper I could barely hear.

Still, it never died.

It hid quietly, somewhere inside me, waiting for a moment to rise again.

A month ago, when the new clinic began draining my health, my energy, even my clarity, I reached a breaking point. My mind felt strained, my body exhausted, and for the first time in years,

I stopped and asked myself:

What am I really doing with my life?

What was my purpose before everything went wrong? It already going wrong in many aspects.

And somehow, in that tired, overwhelmed state… the old dream resurfaced.

The wild one.

The impossible one.

The dream of building something for mankind’s safety.

Something bigger than a job, bigger than a title.

So I decided to try.

Just once.

Just to see if the universe would listen.

Honestly, I thought it was nonsense, a desperate idea written in a moment of emotional chaos. I never expected anyone to take it seriously.

Until the email arrived.

“Your project has been approved.”

I stared at the screen, unable to breathe for a moment.

It felt like the universe had reached out its hand, pulled me back toward the dream I abandoned, and whispered;

“You were meant for this. You just forgot.”

The dream I thought had died…

had simply been waiting for me to return.