“Babe, do we know anyone named Doug Rhone?” Barb asked me as she got out of bed this morning. “I was having weird dreams again. Jews were being rounded up and a man named Doug Rhone was telling us to escape to Texas or Canada.”

During this current spate of antisemitism, having a nightmare of Jews being rounded up, although tragic, is easily explainable. The more startling part of Barb’s dream to me was her mention of Doug Rhone. I did once know Doug, but Barb had never met him. Through the strange workings of the subconscious, Barb had brought up a name she had probably not heard in more than 40 years.

I first met Doug in 1976, when I was a 2nd-year medical student at the University of Illinois in Chicago. With a class of over 400 students, many of us were exiled to surrounding community hospitals for our 3-month long course in pathology. I was assigned to Illinois Masonic Medical Center in the Lake View neighborhood. Our handful of instructors were led by Dr. Douglas Rhone, the new Chairman of Pathology at Masonic.

The students were a rowdy bunch; most of us had no interest in pathology and were more interested in our simultaneous P-Dog (physical diagnosis) lectures and our first experiences examining patients. It would have been hard to predict that two of us would wind up as pathologists.

But by the time my third year of school rolled around, I had chosen pathology as a career. I spent a month doing an elective rotation in the lab at Masonic, as well as months at Northwestern Memorial and Evanston Hospital.

When it came time to rank hospitals for our upcoming residency training, I opted to put Evanston at the top of my list and I landed there on the notorious “Match Day,” the day when medical students around the country learn where their internships and residencies will be. I told Dr. Rhone my decision, and while he was disappointed with my choice, he made me promise to look him up in four years when my residency would end and I would be looking for a permanent position.

It only took three years until Illinois Masonic needed an additional pathologist. Dr. Rhone selected someone from my program at Evanston who was completing his residency a year before me. When I finished my residency the next year I contacted Dr. Rhone, but he told me there were no positions in his department. I wound up practicing at a suburban Chicago hospital.

I had no more opportunities to speak with Dr. Rhone since that day in 1982. In truth, I rarely thought of him. A brief survey of the Internet shows that he passed away in 2011, a death I was not aware of.

You can imagine how stunned I was to hear Barb ask her question this morning. How was it that her brain had held on to Doug Rhone’s name and it appeared in a dream more than 40 years after she had last heard it? The future may be the era of artificial intelligence, but can that ever be as complex, as surprising, or as astounding as our own minds at work?

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