To Sleep, Perchance To Dream - Ay, There's The Rub.

[jones jones]

As a writer I am constantly searching for something new to write about. The downside of this is that often when I fall asleep, my sub-conscious continues to work. I am very prone to having the most vivid and realistic dreams which every now and again morf into some quite horrible nightmares.

Now BooBoo, bless her little cotton night socks, has to bear the brunt of and deal with the consequences of all these late night dramas. Fortunately she's come to recognise the warning signs and is able to take evasive action. She says she is first awakened by a series of loud and drawn out "woooooooooooooos" not unlike an old fashioned railway engine's whistle. After about the third or fourth "wooooooooooooo" BooBoo says, I begin throwing my arms around almost as if I am trying to dislodge an indescribably awful alien bug from off my face. I used to wake up only after I had swept everything off the bedside pedestal - lamp, glass of water, keys, pen and notebook all ending up on the floor.

When I asked her why she didn't wake me up, BooBoo replied: "Well for a start I can't get close enough to you without getting knocked out and also because your heart might stop if I woke you suddenly." BooBoo believes that these nightmares are caused when I am having an "out of body" experience and that I am fighting off demons trying to stop my life force from returning to my body.

These nightmares still occur with frightening regularity, but we have managed to limit the collateral damage by not putting anything on my side of the bed. Also as soon as BooBoo hears my first "wooooooooooooo," she gets up and sits in a chair on the other side of the room until I wake up.

Take the other night for example when I'd been working on the opening of a story. In this particular scene a man and a woman are gazing down at a coffin lying in a grave. Some gravediggers are hovering nearby casting anxious glances up at a rapidly darkening sky, hoping to fill in the grave before it starts raining.

That very night I experienced the most horrific dream ever. In it I was lying on my back in a bath in our garage and BooBoo was standing next to me.

"Why am I lying here?" I ask.

"Because you're dead." she answers. "A woman jumped into the swimming pool and when you went out to investigate, three men stabbed you to death."

"But I don't feel dead." I said.

An ambulance or mortuary vehicle arrived and these two guys put me into a body bag then into the back of the van. I heard one of the neighbors ask: "Is he sick?"

"No he's dead." BooBoo replied.

When we reached the mortuary I was taken out the van and made to walk inside carrying the body bag. What a cheek! Inside someone pointed at row upon row of large wire-mesh boxes and told me to go lie down in one. I looked into the boxes and each one contained several bodies with the top one covered in a blood soaked piece of hessian.

"No, I'm not lying down there." I said.

"Then just lie down anywhere you like." someone said. "You have to because you're dead."

"But I still don't feel like I'm dead." I said.

"Its because you don't know you're dead. Lie down and you will."

I started looking for a place and then noticed a long row of large stainless steel laundry sinks mounted against one wall. Each one held two to three corpses that were being washed by men wearing long plastic aprons. The corpses were all grotesquely posed, their arms and legs jutting out stiffly from their bodies and they seemed charred as if the had been burnt.

Then I suddenly found one of those old Singer treadle sewing machines but it had no machine in it, so I curled up on top of it and waited to feel dead.

I awoke right after that to find BooBoo in bed with her arms around me.

"I just had the worst dream ever." I told her.

"I know." she said.

"How come you're not in the chair then?"

"Because you didn't "wooooooooooooo" once or fight this time.

"I didn't? Then how did you know about my worst dream ever?" I asked.

"I just did." BooBoo replied. " Now go back to sleep ... its late."