A couple of weeks ago I had a fairly vivid dream, and as soon as I woke up, I wrote it down. In the dream, I was one of many students, or perhaps interns, at what seemed to be a kind of hospital with bright white corridors. We were all dressed in white outfits, and part of our daily schedule was a meeting in a large bright auditorium, where an instructor or supervisor would deliver a lecture or review the day's schedule.
On this particular day, there was a pop quiz. The tests were handed out, and I experienced the kind of anxiety that sometimes comes over us in dreams–the realization that I was totally unprepared for this test and could not answer a single question. While I sat staring helplessly at the test paper, the instructor interrupted to say that he'd been informed that one of us had told a patient, “I forgive you.” He wanted to know who'd said this. It turned out I had. At that point, the instructor declared that I no longer had to take the test because I had already learned what I needed to know.
What was most intriguing to me about this strange dream was the issue of forgiveness. It appeared that at some earlier point I'd said I forgive you to a patient at this hospital. And this was evidently a major breakthrough for me. But what did it mean? Why would anyone express forgiveness to a hospital patient anyway? After all, people who come to the hospital are either seriously ill or seriously injured. They don't have anything to be forgiven for. It seemed to make no sense.
As I thought about it (now wide awake), here's the interpretation I came up with. Normally, when we think of forgiveness, it involves people who have done something morally or socially wrong–people who have behaved in a way that is cruel, insensitive, or thoughtless. These are the people who need to be forgiven, if we are going to forgive anybody. But what makes a person behave that way? Isn't it a kind of spiritual sickness or spiritual injury? Aren't acts of cruelty, insensitivity, and thoughtlessness merely expressions of the person's own pain, incompleteness, fear, or sense of inferiority?
If wrongful acts are the result of spiritual disease or damage, then it might make sense to offer forgiveness to someone who comes to the hospital–if it's a hospital focused not on healing the body but the soul. Patients in that hospital would be suffering from spiritual maladies–maladies that no doubt made them seem like bad people, or at least highly disagreeable people, while physically incarnated–maladies that caused them to do things that now stand as a guilty memory and a hindrance to progress. The ultimate cure for such people might indeed rest, not in memorized answers to a standardized test, but in compassion, empathy, and heartfelt forgiveness. In that sense, saying I forgive you might be the highest form of healing, and the ability to say it would be proof of having learned the most important lesson the institution could teach.
Of course, it's possible the dream had no meaning at all. But I doubt it.