Dream a Little Dream of Me, Part 1

"We all remember the bed time stories of our childhoods. The shoe fits Cinderella, the frog turns into a prince, sleeping beauty is awakened with a kiss. Once upon a time and then they lived happily ever after. Fairy tales, the stuff of dreams. The problem is, fairy tales don't come true. It's the other stories, the ones that begin with dark and stormy nights and end in the unspeakable. It's the nightmares that always seem to become reality. - The person that invented the phrase "Happily ever after" should have his ass kicked, so hard!"

- Meredith Grey

Dream a Little Dream of Me, Part 1 is the first episode of the fifth season and the 79th overall episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Short Summary
It is snowing. Meredith is having dreams of Derek dying. Derek moves in with Meredith. Lexie develops an interest in George but realizes it may be futile. The chief is enraged by his number 12 status in a top hospitals list and begins to make the staff work harder. Erica and Callie avoid each other but eventually decide to be awkward about being lesbians together. Cristina gets stabbed but is okay and kisses an Army Trama Surgeon named Owen Hunt.

thumb|300px|right

Full Summary
Meredith stands on a hill as candles slowly started to blow out, one by one, and she talks about not believing in happy endings. She says the "happily ever after" thing is a fairy tale that never comes true. The "dark and stormy night" stories are the ones that come true. Next, Meredith rushes into the emergency room where she is told that Derek had an accident trying to avoid hitting a bus. Bailey and Sloan work to save his life as Meredith watches through a window. They finally give up and Meredith sees Bailey mouth the words, "Time of death..." Meredith screams hysterically and wakes up.



Hahn, Shepherd, Sloan, Yang, Bailey, Karev, Stevens, and Meredith are huddled around a computer for word on the new rankings of teaching hospitals around the country. Sloan hopes Seattle Grace Hospital could bump Johns Hopkins for the top spot after a year at No. 2. Derek belived they would stay number two, Erica says maybe three but Mark is content with a top-five ranking. As everyone waits impatiently, Bailey is constantly reminded to hit the refresh button, she tells them to stop guessing their positions and speculating but Meredith interrupts to say the list is up. They are all thrown for a loop when the ranking comes in at No. 12. The chief is enraged and George tries to calm him but realising Webber's frustration, he leaves.

George then goes to the locker room to get tested on as a practice for his intern exam by Lexie. She convinces him that he will be ready and then notices the snow. She notes how pretty it looks but he says it isn't pretty, its global warming. After he leaves the room she then says that she adores him.



Meredith tells Cristina she keeps having the Derek-dying dream and thinks it is because she is afraid of the happy ending. She decides she will ask Derek to move in with her. Cristina ponders transferring hospitals. Meredith goes on to Cristina about how complicated the situation with Derek is with all the break-ups and on and off periods and even how she'd slept with George, this catches Lexie off guard. Shocked, Lexie asks Cristina for the details, but Cristina rebuffs her, saying not to bother her with anything that isn't medical.

Mark and Derek walk along and Mark tells Derek they can't be number twelve and that Derek is the best neurosurgeon in the world. Derek thanks him and jokingly tells Mark might be the best plastic surgeon in Seattle Grace. Rose walks past and picks up a chart, Derek says hello but she ignores him, says hello to Mark and walks off. Sloan tells him she has "delayed rage, she tried to be the bigger person at first but then realized she hated his guts. He says that while Derek broke up with her personally, he still has to break up with her professionally. Dr. Hahn asks the chief to write a list of how she could to become a better teacher because he'd told her she was a bad teacher, but he says, "Not right now." It is snowing outside and he becomes angrier when she continues to ask and he explains that all the patients from ice-related accidents would go to Mercy West because it was a Level 1 trauma center and Seattle Grace no longer was so when he says no, he means no. As he walks off, Callie and Hahn had an awkward moment, Erica pretends to get a page and Callie puts a newspaper to her face and walks the opposite way.

Bailey and her old interns stand outside in the cold waiting hopefully for an emergency patient to roll in, but no ambulances shows up. As it is freezing, they turn to go inside but just then a woman named Sarabeth Breyers haphazardly drives up to the ER with two friends and the driver of a limo, Billy who they had distangled from the limo window. The three women in the car were going to the "Fire & Ice" ball and their husbands were in another limo. One of the women, Betty, suddenly fails to recall what had happened and where they were. They are rushed inside but when Bailey has the limo driver, Webber takes him away for himself.



Izzie, George and the other tend to the patients and as George tries to clean a cut on one of their foreheads, she tells him as an intern, he has to get somebody else and he cannot touch her face.

Later, Izzie takes the patient whos memory resets every 30 seconds, down for a CT scan, Alex joins her and she asks how he is doing with the Ava situation and that she still thinks of Denny. Alex just says not to worry and that he is fine. After numerous times of Izzie calming the patient, Alex tells her that she is in a space ship. He and Izzie laugh and he leaves.

Callie and Hahn have another awkward moment walking over to Bailey. Callie asks if Bailey has any jobs for her but Bailey says no and that she is charting as the chief stole her only trauma. Callie walks off and then Hahn explains to Bailey in some detail some medical ailment because she is trying to improve her teaching. Mark asks her would she like to see his methods but she says no. He disregards it and says he uses truth and wisdom. George and Lexie walk up to Mark, Lexie tries to find out if Gerorge really did have sex with Meredith but George interrupts her and asks Mark to tend to a patient who won't let him tend to the scar on her face as he is an intern. He calls George an idiot (using his truth and wisdom technique) and walks off. Lexie quietly calls Sloan an ass.

Later, Bailey hears that a limo with three men had been in an accident and tells the three women that they can "insist" that they be brought to Seattle Grace.

The chief later praises her for stealing the patients from Mercy West, suddenly an ambulace arrives and one of the husbands are rolled out on a stretcher with a pen in his throat, he had been given a tracheotomy by an army man, Owen Hunt. The Chief was shocked but Cristina was amazed.



One of the women, Anna, call the man "sweetheart," but it wasn't her husband—it was Sarabeth's husband. Anna explains the situation to Meredith, saying that she still loved her husband, but that little pieces of you get chipped away by another person, and you shave little pieces of yourself away so that you'll fit together. Then one day you look up and you don't even know who you are. Meredith then ponders and dreads the though that this could be the same for her and Derek in a few years.

One of the husbands was "circling the drain," but the chief insists that they save him as he had something to prove. The patient had an injury that would likely prevent him from walking again, but Owen, says to Callie and Derek that they could perform a procedure involving freezing him in order to give him a chance. Derek says no and doesn't appreciate him giving his patient and his wife false hope, and tells Cristina to get him out of there.

Bailey and Alex are shocked to discover that Sarabeth's insurance would be up by midnight, they would still treat her and her husband but that she should sort out the insurance. She tells them helplessly, that her husband took care of those things. Cristina takes Owen to get his leg stitched up since it had been badly cut in the car accident but as soon as she cleans it out, she goes to numb it but he begins to staple his leg himself without anesthesia, which Cristina is again amazed by. Callie then comes in and asks Owen to tell her about the freezing thing. Rose, meanwhile, takes every chance she has to insult Derek. In surgery when he decides to use a different scalpel than the one he'd asked for, she chastises him for changing his mind. Then, when he works on two patients at once, she says juggling two people at once is what he does best.

Meredith worries aloud to Izzie that in 40 years, she'd feel dead inside and become a big, fat, lying cheater. Izzie tells Meredith that Derek's a good man and that its not the years that count but the connection, they go on to talk about how Alex had changed and become a good man as well.

In surgery, the chief decides that the No. 12 ranking must have been some kind of clerical error. Hahn tells the chief she'd been studying other doctors' methods, but he suggests she ask her students about how they like to learn, he quickly asks Cristina, since she was there. Cristina says nervously she learned best by being asked questions rather than just being told what to do, Hahn gets defensive asking if she was talking about her the chief tells Hahn to calm down and to allow Cristina to continue but they stop as the patient begins to code.

Sarabeth asks her husband about the insurance and tells him she learned that all the credit cards had been canceled. He doesn't respond and is wheeled away to surgery. Lexie confronts Sloan and says that he was "unnecessarily mean" to George, but Sloan guesses she wants George to be her boyfriend, and refuses to change his ways unless she can admit she likes George. Meredith mentions to Alex that Izzie was right about him having a softer side, and Alex gets upset and annoyed, thinking Izzie had told Meredith that he'd cried. He storms off to confront Izzie and realizing she had said something wrong, Meredith tries to call him back.

Derek approaches Rose and tells her that he couldn't have her in his OR if she continued to act the way she was acting. He asks her why she is behaving the way she is. After a few moments she tells him that's she is pregnant with his child. He is shocked and she bursts out laughing saying it was a lie she then tells him he has no right to ask her to leave his OR and that she won't be going anywhere.



Callie asks the chief if they should try freezing the potentially paralyzed patient. He tells her it is risky and although Derek disagrees she can do it. Ater telling Sloan to shut up in a surgery Gerorge is furious with Lexie and tells her to stop defending him and he knows he is the hospital joke.

Meanwhile, Meredith drones on and on about planning her life with Derek to Cristina, and after cracking, Cristina tells her to shut up. She says Meredith that she and Derek will not work and that she iss making a mistake by moving in with him. She says she doesn't want to hear about Derek as all they will do is break up. She goes to walk back inside before slipping. Meredith laughs and tells her she deserved it, also laughing, Cristina asks Meredith to pull her up. As Meredith goes to do so, an icicle breaks off from the roof of the building and lodges itself in Cristina's stomach.

Main Cast

 * Ellen Pompeo as Dr. Meredith Grey
 * Sandra Oh as Dr. Cristina Yang
 * Katherine Heigl as Dr. Izzie Stevens
 * Justin Chambers as Dr. Alex Karev
 * T.R. Knight as Dr. George O'Malley
 * Chandra Wilson as Dr. Miranda Bailey
 * James Pickens, Jr. as Dr. Richard Webber
 * Sara Ramírez as Dr. Callie Torres
 * Eric Dane as Dr. Mark Sloan
 * Chyler Leigh as Dr. Lexie Grey
 * Brooke Smith as Dr. Erica Hahn
 * Patrick Dempsey as Dr. Derek Shepherd

Guest Stars

 * Kevin McKidd as Dr. Owen Hunt
 * Mariette Hartley as Betty Kenner
 * Lauren Stamile as Nurse Rose
 * Cliff DeYoung as Phil Loomis
 * John Getz as Michael Breyers
 * Bernadette Peters as Sarabeth Breyers
 * Kathy Baker as Anna Loomis

Co-Starring

 * Mark Saul as Intern Steve
 * Amrapali Ambegaokar as Intern Dani
 * Terrance Christopher Jones as Paramedic
 * Joy Osmanski as Intern Lucy
 * Molly Kidder as Intern Megan

Notes and Trivia

 * This episode's title originated from the song Dream a Little Dream of Me, originally sung by The Mamas & The Papas.
 * This episode scored 18.29 million viewers.
 * The episode begins roughly at 4:15pm and finishes roughly at 2:30am.
 * This two-part episode has three dreams. The dead Derek dream, Cristina's dream of her and Meredith, and the fairy tale of the three princesses.

Quotes

 * Meredith: And then you know what's gonna happen after he moves in don't you? We build a house on his land, which will be OUR land because we'll be married. And then I'll be Dr. Mrs. Shepherd. And you know what comes after that don't you? Babies. They'll be his babies so they'll have perfect hair, and they'll be chatty. So I'll have five chatty children, a chatty husband, and live in a house in the wilderness. And then I'll start sleeping with your husband. I gotta tell him I've changed my mind. Don't you think?
 * Cristina: MEREDITH!


 * Lexie (to George after he has left the room): ...I totally adore you by the way...