Dreamscape: To Japan on a bicycle

Seeing my guests off

We had a wonderful evening together, friends and strangers about to be friends, and then it was time to go home. They had come a long way and we set off to the station.

There were two bicycles, that is what they apparently rode on to visit as we made for the station. It was late, we had to be quick. On getting to the station, I was in charge of one of the bicycles and we had difficulty going through the gates or finding the right platform.

In the process, we lost sight of each other and I was left with one of the strangers, in the confusion, as we ran up and down the escalators, one of us walked the way down an escalator as it was rolling up, I could not do that with a bicycle. We finally found our platform, two trains leaving at the same time, for Japan.

A toilet wonder to behold

I got on the train and found a seat as the stranger did beside me, only to be disturbed by a hawker who through the whole journey was selling snake-oil remedies using the context of Japanese fables of old, nothing that I heard was worth parting with my hard-earned cash for.

Meanwhile, the technology on the train could not be ignored, I could push a button, very much like the stopping bell of a bus, to initiate a bowel evacuation by wireless means, fascinating it was, that no one could tell who was filling the toilet with waste, it could really have been anyone else.

Time and station stops late into the night, we got to last stop and alighted. Then it seemed our none of our other company made any of the trains, they were stuck somewhere incomprehensible as we spoke on the phone.

A cab to nowhere sensible

I thought I could ride the bicycle back home when I realised I had left it on the train, the train that already left the station taking the staff with it. The other trains were pulling out that I just could not summon the courage to tell my friend that I had lost her bicycle.

The matter of getting home from Japan became a pressing issue, I had to get a taxi, the first shop had unhelpful people who pretended to offered a service of indifference and mockery, they did not care. When I found the cab office, the faces all looked familiar but I was not sure, the drivers unperturbed in every state of lackadaisical abandon until the controller was pointed out to me.

He asked where I was going, my home was a place I had not been in 27 years, the cost I could not meet because I did not have enough money and as I was thinking of booking a hotel room for the night, I did not have to do any of that, I was saved the ordeal.

REM - Rapid Eye Madness

For between Edinburgh where I am, the London Underground where we boarded trains for Japan, probably a suburb called Japan-town very much like Chinatown, a cab office that seemed to have Nigerian drivers to wanting a ride to Isolo in Lagos, Nigeria, I was caught in the landscape of vivid dreams, where distances are shortened and problems can be quite insurmountable.

I had jolted out of my sleep as the background activity coming from my computer playing Channel 4 on BBC was broadcasting the Japan season ended. Phew!

The damage done when parents fail to listen

Present and past meeting

I am not one to watch horror films, but I happened upon the compelling viewing of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark which against my wiser instincts I watched.

What occurred to me was the very familiar story of a child seeing things and that child having serious problems convincing their guardians of their experiences.

We have been schooled with the view that kids tell tales or tell lies for opportunity, advantage or attention, even when those things begin to affect the emotional, social and mental stability of the child.

Choosing not to believe

Sadly, the issue of child sexual abuse, nightmares and ‘seeing things’ fall into the same category of experiences that parents or guardians flimsily dismiss as trivial and fantasy, leaving the child to suffer until more damage is done.

At times, they will find some rational or logical explanation, and for their benefit, they may be right, but it should never be grounds to dismiss whatever the child has been through. At the very least, trust the child and strive to verify exactly what troubles the child. Maybe get professional help, not elders, not pastors, not rituals - PROFESSIONAL HELP - Like psychotherapy.

I had a similar experience when I was 10, during the day, my aunt and our houseboy shared stories about unexplainable events, those stories which I heard and can still recall to complete detail became seeds fuelled by the vivid and fertile imagination of a child. My nightmare was about to start; we only needed the dark and the quiet to enliven it.

That evening we had guests, my mother’s childhood friend and her husband, she was also the step-mother of Tola Awobode, the Lare of Cock Crow At Dawn (Music video).

I can’t continue

Let me digress, I will have to write this story fully another time, in fact, every time I have attempted to write this story, I have been distracted. It is possible, I do not know whether, the story will really be written, and I’m in shock.

My memory serves me well, that only yesterday, as I wondered how I remembered parts of the home address of my friend, he asked how far my vivid memory goes and I answered, back to about the age of three.

I began this blog to write about the need for parents and guardians to pay greater heed, sometimes against their better judgement if that comes into play to certain radically life changing experience of their wards, the scars of which I still bear and part of what sometimes still informs the way I interact with my parents.

The need for professional therapy

My experience was dismissed as fantasy by my father, my mother however was anxious, he left her to throw whatever she could into the situation to help me when probably professional therapy would have helped rather than visits to spiritualists of different persuasions, which with hindsight heightened my anxiety and weakened my ability to deal with the situation for decades after the event.

I read Psalms over bottles, cups, or buckets of water, seeing religious service as a fearful dreadful experience that required you pay for any comfort or peace through some laborious routine of service, recitation and ritual, it was not a lovely episode in my young life that continued into my first term in boarding school.

I guess, I have gotten the substance of my intent across without touching the detail of my personal experience.

However, in digging up this memory, I just now found out from the Internet that Tola Awobode had died just over 4 years ago. We knew her as Auntie Tola, it was a pleasure to watch her perform as Lare on Cock Crow at Dawn, I never knew what else she did – that is what I have now just read in her obituary.

Thought Picnic: Miss a pill, dream a drill

Fear costing dear

There was a time I feared for going on pills, a prescription that went on interminably until some new discovery in medicine and pharmacology meant that either the dosage was reduced or for a determined period time, usage brought a cure.

It was this fear that precipitated a serious threat to my life when I for a time ignored the tiredness and seemingly failing health that suggested I had cancer until at diagnosis, I had only 5 weeks left if I did not respond to the aggressive treatment that my doctor said could cure the problem.

Managing drug therapy

When my chemotherapy taken every three weeks was increased from two, to four, to six and then to eight, I was told some had up to fourteen sessions. When after my seventh, I saw that a ninth session had been scheduled, I told my doctor, I was not mentally prepared from anything beyond the eighth. They stopped after the seventh, it was a reprieve.

Yet, after all that pain of cancer finally subsided, it took me another two months to come off the opioid medication. I was cutting the patch in half and keeping it on for longer because the side-effects of sudden removal were almost debilitating, it was horrible.

Planning ahead

Now, any time I go away, I always pack enough pills, just in case I have to be away longer than I initially planned. In fact, any journey has to be regulated to the amount of medication I can successfully take away without being considered a peddler of controlled substances.

The last weekend saw me in London socialising and I had every thought to fill my pill box before leaving home. It is usually the first thing I put in my bag, however, between the rush and the lapse in memory, I have halfway to London when I realised the pills were still at home. That meant two nights without my pills. Probably nothing too serious.

Back on top

Then again, my pills are ones where you try to do a catch-up of missed dosages, you just settle back into routine as soon as possible. Besides, this should not happen too frequently or the visitation of something difficult to handle might materialise.

So, on getting home, I took my pills at the usual time and rolled into bed under my warmed-up electric blanket, setting the alarm for 6:30AM because it was going to be one of my unusually early days to work.

Effects that endure

When, I first went on these pills almost 5 years ago, yes, 5 years in May, I was told of a number of side-effects I will have – vivid dreams, feeling stoned, insomnia, possible depression – for a while, I refused to read the leaflet lest I be overcome with a sense of hypochondria and any other mental indisposition that will make me utterly uncomfortable.

I had many of the first for the first few weeks, one dream I remember was being the gatekeeper to heaven and hell – Read about that here. I had to search the Internet to get an understanding of what it meant to be stoned, just as I once did to understand what it meant to have a hangover. I was stoned every night for years, but because I took my pills at 23:00, I was already in bed with a light head in the clouds.

For sleeplessness, they offered more pills, I declined, in fact that was the reason I moved my pill time from 20:00 to 23:00, I was not going to have drug-induced sleep, it was fearful enough being on four different drugs after I left hospital with varying levels of drowsiness side-effects, at one time, I thought I will never wake up.

For the depression, which I was neither sure I had or not, I went for therapy, because I knew that having suffered catastrophic loss of health, wealth, status and material things, I needed to talk with someone and better talk with professionals.

A nightmare story

After a few hours’ sleep, I woke up from an event, an old school friend and I, from as far back as my secondary school days – that is over three decades ago; met up and were walking back to some place, probably where we both lived.

From what I can recall, on our way out, there was no incident, but some construction activity had begun when we were returned. There was some heavy-duty activity going on and it looked like one of the workmen was swing a hammer to break concrete slabs.

I was a bit apprehensive, I did not think we could get through the site when my friend decided to make a run for it and as he passed the workman, he disappeared. It was not a hammer he was wielding, but a hoe-like scythe, a kind of horrific tool that can only be manufactured in the mind of a dream, but has no practical use or purpose.

This is the reason why I never watch horror films, I have the capacity to think up horror without encouragement.

Waking up

My friend had been scythed, amputated from the torso taking off the right leg, then the workman picked him up and flung him out of the way where I ran up to tend to him.

He did not die, nor did he bleed profusely, and he did not go into shock. He vividly saw what happened to him as I also replayed what could have happened in my mind as we waited for the ambulance. An awfully terrible sight and the return of vivid dreams, a reminder that I should never go off the regime of my pills except when medically advised to.

My mind was already overloaded with the consequences of that event, I woke up soon after, knowing fully well that, it was one of those dreams I will never forget, etched into my consciousness and the making of another bizarre story.

Please! No repeats or sequels for this dream

Seeding my dreams

I was warned one of the side effects would be vivid dreams, so I tried to fill my head with unsolved problems hoping to unravel the conundrums by utilising the excessive brain-power seeking thoughts to manipulate in sleep.

My thinking was like idle computers could be employed in parallel processing of complex algorithms, maybe dreams could be seeded with ideas and situation we do not seem to consciously resolve fast enough or well enough.

Too vivid for my memory

However, the dream I had on the Wednesday night onto Thursday morning is one I would not want a repeat of, neither would I want a sequel of it.

The vividness of the dream however stays with me from at type of remote addressing for systems where the links to the parts I wanted to address had decayed to becoming the gatekeeper of the portal to the afterlife.

The way that portal operated was what was intriguing, I was not afraid of the dead or the zombies that seemed to want to control me, I felt ready to deal with that and I ended up mastering that situation where normally people fell into a stupor of subservience.

Water and mercury

The portal however was like a concrete slab on which you stood and it flipped open in 2 ways to reveal a pool of water or a pool of mercury. When I finally got to discard the zombie, the portal flipped for the watery section indicating a good afterlife for that subject.

Apparently, the mercury pool represented the absence of life or ability, I caught a glimpse of the glistening pool as the portal flipped and even though I felt I might fall in either pool, there was a sense of balance that overtook me ensuring the portal slammed shut without taking in unready visitors.

I woke soon afterwards wondering what that was all about and this is just 6 days into my new pills to compound the long stretches of sleeplessness with sleeping pills? I think not, vivid dreams are had enough, but if you cannot wake up quick from them, that could be your final undoing.

If only we really could survive without any sleep, sometimes.

Dummies Guide to Hanging

Blood-thirsty voyeurism

I did not avail myself of the opportunity to view the humiliation of Saddam Hussein, the reports were graphic enough, and one had to be spared that additional savage voyeurism that came with the true videos of the real judicial murder.

As if that were not enough, additional videos were published taken by stealth of a large gash to Saddam Hussein’s neck and some bruising to his face which hopefully was caused by the hanging rather than the rats who rejoiced around the corpse as they worked out the frenzy of revenge.

Now, the other two condemned ones were hanged just before dawn and we are informed that this was also filmed, this time; I hope the government would not lie to us about the events, most especially the shameless lying National Security Advisor; I just cannot bring myself to like him on any level.

Most importantly is the hope that the witnesses were more circumspect than the first mob of disrepute, but that would not take away from the certain other detail that has now been revealed.

Hangman’s Manual 101

No one it seems attempted to determine that the body plunge at the releasing of the trap door and the dislocation of the spinal column in the neck area might exert a greater effect as to have the head rolling off, probably into the laps of the onlookers.

The BBC link offers a general idea of what should happen

Execution intended to break the neck, not strangle

‘Long drop’ method developed in late 19th Century

Length of rope calculated using prisoner's weight

Drop is usually 4ft-10ft (1.3m-3m)

Too long a drop leads to decapitation

It would appear the method used to hang these men is Victorian – in 2007? Thus far has civilisation brought us that we return to crude methods of killing that make mean savages of otherwise intelligent men.

Even this simple exercise of hanging could not be conducted with a modicum of professional application.

Their nightmares begin

Anyone who was within earshot of the gruesome straining sound that had the body snap off to make a hanging an outright decapitation would remember that sound for a long time, the ones who saw the body separate from the head would dream of it till the day they die – it is no curse.

Men have had nightmares unspeakable for seeing or hearing a lot less, we shall see if the justice done for those of Dujail shall now been read as justice served for those of Halabja.

The lament I hear is that of death and destruction that has been visited upon Iraq, unwarranted, illegally, unabated and continually – May the souls of all Iraqis dead – Rest In Peace, be it of the good or the evil, we leave the rest to God.