Following on from my last upbeat entry, sadly Sarah’s fantastical dream world is not all fun-filled ‘Come Dine with Me’ episodes and getting knocked up by 50 Cent. An overactive psyche is like a bad drug-induced trip – all’s fine while you’re getting high, finding hidden meanings within your exhaled smoke formations, and giggling, but when the subconscious turns nasty on you, that’s then you suddenly find yourself trapped in a hideous, psychedelic, traumatising, inexorable, nightmarish experience from which you physically can’t escape. Which probably explains why the one time I smoked any really strong weed in Cambodia, I ended up hiding under my duvet, rocking back and forth in a state of paranoid frenzy that some sleaze who’d been hitting on me earlier in the evening was going to come back and rape, murder and possibly dismember me in my bed that night. From now on am sticking with excessive amounts of red wine to alter my consciousness, thank you very much.
For example, a few weeks back I had an absolutely horrific dream, which basically started out with me, my Dad, my brother, and for reasons inexplicable also my colleague Max, all on some kind of outdoor retreat in the forest. Presumably to collect wood for a campfire or something, Max was cutting branches off trees with a chainsaw, but accidentally turned around too quickly one way and sliced my brother in the abdomen, then in jumping back from my brother also managed to get my Dad in the neck. Luckily my Dad’s head stayed on if he held it in place, but my brother (who in real life is actually a doctor) was left with a great gaping gap in his side pouring blood and plopping out the odd vital internal organ or two…
We vainly tried to stem the blood as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, which seeing as we were in the middle of the forest, took an absolute eternity, and then when it did turn up could only fit me and my brother, leaving my Dad (still grievously injured with half his head hanging off) waiting in anguish for the next one. And then on top of that, after driving us down from the forest and into town, the bastards then forcibly dropped us off at some dive of a greasy-spoon, saying they had reached the limits of their designated healthcare district, and that another ambulance would be along shortly to take us the rest of the way to hospital. In the meantime, my poor brother had turned pale, unconscious, and with bits of himself falling out all over the place, till eventually all that remained of him is one meagre slice of tomato and the limp fabric of his face, which having slipped off his skull now resembled some cheap rubber Halloween mask. When eventually the second ambulance turned up, thanks to good old NHS cutbacks, it turned out to be a kebab van filling in out-of-hours, with a stretcher in the back crammed in next to the old dead man’s leg...
All credit to the British healthcare system though, once at the hospital, they did stitch my brother back up again from his paltry tomato-based remains, and a day or two later he was back to true Daniel form, gorging on cheese sandwiches, despite my concerned warnings that he would split his stitches that way… So a happy ending all round one might think, except that a day or two later we (my brother, his fiancé and I) were escorted by ambulance car over to the hospital where my Dad was now being treated for his chainsaw-related neck injuries. Unfortunately, for some reason, instead of keeping their eyes on the road, the two irate ambulance drivers kept turning round to hurl abuse and flip the bird to the three of us sitting in the back, despite our desperate pleas for them to both calm down and turn their attention back to the road... Inevitably, full head-on collision with another vehicle soon ensued, with lucky me getting to watch the whole thing in graphic slow motion from some disembodied viewpoint in front of our car… Eyes bulged, faces hit windscreen, throats were cut by shattering glass, bodies were propelled violently forwards, my brother’s stitches all burst from the impact, and all sorts of other gruesome consequences all slowly and surely played out before my very eyes… and then I mercifully woke up, unsurprisingly perhaps in a state of sheer and absolute terror.
Moral of the story – Max, next time be more careful with the damn chainsaw!!!
For example, a few weeks back I had an absolutely horrific dream, which basically started out with me, my Dad, my brother, and for reasons inexplicable also my colleague Max, all on some kind of outdoor retreat in the forest. Presumably to collect wood for a campfire or something, Max was cutting branches off trees with a chainsaw, but accidentally turned around too quickly one way and sliced my brother in the abdomen, then in jumping back from my brother also managed to get my Dad in the neck. Luckily my Dad’s head stayed on if he held it in place, but my brother (who in real life is actually a doctor) was left with a great gaping gap in his side pouring blood and plopping out the odd vital internal organ or two…
We vainly tried to stem the blood as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, which seeing as we were in the middle of the forest, took an absolute eternity, and then when it did turn up could only fit me and my brother, leaving my Dad (still grievously injured with half his head hanging off) waiting in anguish for the next one. And then on top of that, after driving us down from the forest and into town, the bastards then forcibly dropped us off at some dive of a greasy-spoon, saying they had reached the limits of their designated healthcare district, and that another ambulance would be along shortly to take us the rest of the way to hospital. In the meantime, my poor brother had turned pale, unconscious, and with bits of himself falling out all over the place, till eventually all that remained of him is one meagre slice of tomato and the limp fabric of his face, which having slipped off his skull now resembled some cheap rubber Halloween mask. When eventually the second ambulance turned up, thanks to good old NHS cutbacks, it turned out to be a kebab van filling in out-of-hours, with a stretcher in the back crammed in next to the old dead man’s leg...
All credit to the British healthcare system though, once at the hospital, they did stitch my brother back up again from his paltry tomato-based remains, and a day or two later he was back to true Daniel form, gorging on cheese sandwiches, despite my concerned warnings that he would split his stitches that way… So a happy ending all round one might think, except that a day or two later we (my brother, his fiancé and I) were escorted by ambulance car over to the hospital where my Dad was now being treated for his chainsaw-related neck injuries. Unfortunately, for some reason, instead of keeping their eyes on the road, the two irate ambulance drivers kept turning round to hurl abuse and flip the bird to the three of us sitting in the back, despite our desperate pleas for them to both calm down and turn their attention back to the road... Inevitably, full head-on collision with another vehicle soon ensued, with lucky me getting to watch the whole thing in graphic slow motion from some disembodied viewpoint in front of our car… Eyes bulged, faces hit windscreen, throats were cut by shattering glass, bodies were propelled violently forwards, my brother’s stitches all burst from the impact, and all sorts of other gruesome consequences all slowly and surely played out before my very eyes… and then I mercifully woke up, unsurprisingly perhaps in a state of sheer and absolute terror.
Moral of the story – Max, next time be more careful with the damn chainsaw!!!
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