Something weird is happening to me. Thankfully it’s nothing overtly neurotic. It’s just that I have been having these dreams lately. That and I can’t sleep, or rather I sleep but I wake up pretty early. Like 3.30am. That’s a tad ungodly, no? Like I’m some sort of a night runner in Kama’gambo (Google that). Should I be worried? Because I’m becoming a bit anxious. A bit shifty.
It’s been going on for two months now, this erratic sleeping pattern. But the dreams only just started. For instance, and please tell me if this isn’t cuckoo. Last Friday I dreamt I was on a stage, before an audience, a real hostile audience. I was telling jokes. Yes, go ahead and laugh because I sure wasn’t getting any laughs from the audience. I was some sort of stand-up comedian, like Churchill, only I sucked. Even in the dream I could tell telling jokes wasn’t my calling. I was wearing my high school sweater and these ugly shoes with a big shiny buckle on the side. And my jokes fell flat on their faces. Nobody laughed, but the few who did laughed at me. The rest lobbed stuff at me – cans of beer, bottles, empty cigarette packets, hats that smelled of vomit, car keys, tomatoes…These things came at me like a gigantic avalanche. I didn’t try to duck them, instead, in a very narcissistic way; I took them all on the chin, perhaps because I realized it was an apt reprieve for my total lack of talent as a comedian. The only thing that was more impressive than my jokes, perhaps, was the stoicism with which I took my punishment.
But before that dream -on a different night- I had dreamt I was seated outside my gate at night, chatting with this loud lout of a neighbor of mine I can’t stand. Him who still lives at home with his parents. Him who comes home at some odd hours, blasting music or fighting his girlfriends as his poor ageing mom tries to intervene. The pied piper of drama. We ran into each other often, mostly at the fuel station but we have never spoken a word to each other, much less a courteous nod. Nothing. And yet I dreamt we were standing at the gate and we were talking about- and wait for this – cabbages! Not politics, not sports, not the weather…cabb-freakin-ages! As if we were a bunch of farmers discussing the rains and manure. Yes, yes, I know, totally vegetable.
In the past two weeks or so I have had many dreams, most of which are unimpressionable and forgettable by the time I stir awake. Small snippets of weird dreams that don’t make sense. Unfathomable dreams. Then as if this punishment isn’t bad enough I wake up at 3am to stare in darkness. I wake up to labour in solitude and in silence because indeed the night belongs to the silent, to the abandoned. The forgotten souls of the night. My body clock has literally gone to the dogs. I called my cousin, a doctor, and I asked her what she thought of this latest phenomenon – I’m one of those people who have a lot of faith in medicine as a profession, the bastion of answers.
“It’s nothing really.” She assured me.
“I’m dreaming about cabbages and my neighbor, surely it must be something.” I protested.
“Look, dreams often are a manifestation of our subconscious.”
“If you are trying to imply that I think of my neighbor then perhaps we are having the wrong conversation.”
“Oh no,” she said good naturedly, “I didn’t mean that.”
“And I don’t even like cabbages. Why would I dream about the two things I don’t like, cabbages and my neighour?”
“Perhaps, look. It’s nothing. We all dream all the time, and dreams shouldn’t make sense.”
She didn’t know what she was talking about but she didn’t want to seem lacking in knowledge. So she was feeding me rhetoric, pep talk. “It will come to pass,” she assured. Well, it hasn’t.
Three AM is a terribly lonely hour. The night is deathly quiet at 3am, still and somewhat melancholic. There is not much to do when the world is asleep but mull over things. I normally get onto twitter in the hope that I will find an insomniac, wandering aimlessly in the timeless space of their Timeline. Normally – against my better judgment –
I log onto Facebook and there, like a thief, I sneak into strangers pages and stare at their pictures and that of their friends while they sleep, oblivious of my intrusion. Facebook burglary. The vanity that lives on Facebook has never ceased to horrify me. But I – like a homeless hound – sniff around for human company. And these images normally make me feel closer to humankind, offering me a buffer from the isolation that insomnia brings. But often when there is no more sites left to prowl on the internet, when there is no bush left to shake for that human feeling, I normally lie back and stare into darkness, into the dark abyss of time that cries out to be filled. Those moments I wish I would rob the missus’s off her undisrupted sleep.
When you have nothing to do but stare into space at 3am you think because your mind is the only escape vessel you posses. I imagine a cab driver sitting in his car, waiting for a fare, but also waiting for sunrise. I imagine him nodding off in his car, dressed in a heavy coat and a scarf, trying to make a living, trying to see his kids’ through school, trying to pay off a loan, dozing off in his car, the vessel in which his dreams live…and ride. I picture a woman in a night bus headed to Nairobi to see her boyfriend because they have been having problems, because he’s been acting funny and they need to talk things over. She needs to look into his eyes to see if there’s still something there, or she is just wasting her time. She sits in night bus headed to Nairobi getting nearer to her moment of truth. I imagine a guy in a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean, headed to Nairobi. I see him putting away alcohol, numbing his heart which bleeds with sorrow because he is coming home to bury a loved one. I see a man, just back from a night out with this woman he has been dying to impress. They are lying on their backs under the covers, nude. She’s nursing a thin veiled disappointment and he a deserved embarrassment and he’s telling her in an unsteady voice, “This has never happened before.” Hehehe.
This morning (I’m writing this at 9pm, Sunday) I woke up at 3.56pm and checked BBC for the latest. Egypt was still burning. A train had killed people in Europe. Madiba was recovering somewhere in Jozi. Life was going on in spite of my lack of sleep. The blue light from my phone lit my face in the dark; I must have looked like a ghost. Anyway I went to the living room and read this book by Tony Parsons, brilliant writer. The book is about this 50yr old guy who gets a heart transplant from a 19yr old guy and his life starts transforming; he starts acting young; tattoos, jeans, cars, parties, the works. The book talks of Cellular Memory Phenomenon where a transplant recipient takes on the characteristic of their donor. Of how a recipient who received a heart of a teenager who committed suicide ended up killing themselves the same way their donor did. Or how a recipient’s blood group changed upon receiving a new organ. Freaky shit. And I wonder why I can’t sleep. Anyway, somehow an hour later I snatched some snooze, and I dreamt.
There is an opening scene in the movie John Q where a woman (a heart donor) dies on the freeway, her vehicle squashed by a truck. In my dream, I’m carrying her heart in this leather man bag. I swear I’m not making this up. Anyway, I meet these two cops and they ask me what I have in the bag, and stupidly I tell them “Nothing, just a heart.”
“A hat?” they chorused.
“Yes, a heart.”
“Why aren’t you wearing the hat?”
“Well, ‘coz it’s a heart.”
“Is it your hat?”
“Obviously not!”
Look, I will be honest, that bit of conversation didn’t happen in my dream, but it should have. Anyway the cops demand to have the heart. To have my heart, because really I found it so it was mine. I tell them I can’t give them the heart. “Haven’t you watched the movie? This heart is needed to save a boy’s life.” I say. They are laughing at me. Really cackling with mirth. As if I’m real funny. Well, where were they in my stand-up comedy dream? By the way, we are along States House road, and somehow I’m in the car and they are standing on the pavement. I’m pleading with these two heartless officers, who are carrying an ice cooler. Not guns, but a cooler! I don’t remember how that dream ended, but when I woke up I realized I had only slept for 30mins. A deep disturbed sleep. I woke up and went running.
I’m tired of dreaming about cabbages. Really tired of dreaming of being the most hated comedian in Dreamville. If you can’t be funny in your dreams, where else can you be funny? no really tell me, I’m out of ideas here. And I’m tired of carrying hearts in man bags. And of wiry cops lugging ice coolers. I want to say I’m tired of losing sleep, but that would be an oxymoron because if I’m tired why then can’t I just sleep like those politicians in parliament, yes why?