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  Athos MR strongly recommends medical or psychiatric supervision or at least the physical presence of a relative or familiar of the listener for the duration of the narration. Athos MR is the world’s largest Mind Recovery Company dedicated to uniting individuals with their minds worldwide.

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  Sabzi dials 1.

  A SWOT team broke into Sabzi’s apartment after a neighbour reported a foul smell emanating from it. They found Sabzi slumped on the sofa with the telephone on his lap. He had soiled himself. His pupils had dilated so wide you couldn’t see the whites of his eyes.

  The medical unit of the SWOT team loaded him on a stretcher and rushed him to AIIMS, and from there the next morning, Thenkasi had him flown to HIMHANS, where he’s reported to be encouraging fellow inmates to do pranayama every day, for forty-five minutes in the morning during sunrise and again for forty-five minutes in the evening during sunset. The head of psychopathology and neurovirology at HIMHANS subsequently published a monograph – which was reviewed and also partly edited by Sabzi – on the therapeutic benefits of pranayama on patients suffering from multi-point psychosis.

  The monograph caught the interest of an artificial intelligence sent on a reconnaissance mission to planet Earth by the advanced civilization of hyperintelligent haemorrhoids of Astra 241, who read it and filed a detailed review-summary of it for its supervisors back home. The hyperintelligent haemorrhoids of planet Astra 241 recognized the pranayama techniques and patterns described as a wholesale copy of their own breath-based language and communication system which they had been using from before the time planet Earth, let alone human beings, had been haemorrhoids, and slapped a case of copyright violation and outright plagiarism on the management of planet Earth, seeking damages of eight billion human slaves. And human beings have been slaves to the advanced civilization of hyperintelligent haemorrhoids ever since.

  AN ENQUIRY INTO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ATTACHMENT

  Once upon a time, there lived a woman who loved her pet very much. Her pet was a beautiful bird of unspecified species that she kept in a cage, and not just any cage but a big, spacious, golden cage full of all the amenities a bird could ask for. It had several interesting swings, a chime for the bird to play with, an Xbox 560 with apps for avians, and even a 3D hologram of the sky designed to make the bird feel it was mid-flight – just so it wouldn’t miss the sky, being a bird and all.

  While the bird seemed mostly content, with all its needs taken care of, it was subject to sudden, inexplicable bouts of sadness, phases when it refused to chirp to its owner, refused to eat, refused to occupy its customary perch on its favourite red rhino-headed hoop, and instead sank onto its belly on the cage floor, its body all hunched up into itself. Even the owner’s declarations that she loved it very much – she said ‘I love you’ to the bird at least eighteen times a day, on average – could not stir it out of its catatonic stupor.

  The bird’s owner was distressed by these mood swings. She took her pet to a bird psychiatrist. The bird psychiatrist found nothing wrong with the bird. ‘This is a normal, healthy bird,’ said the bird psychiatrist. ‘Some exercise is all it needs. That should take care of its mood swings.’

  The bird’s owner, who loved the bird very much, took two days off from work to hunt for a suitable treadmill for the bird. She finally found one in an antique shop in the old part of the city. The shopkeeper told her it once belonged to the city’s circus.

  The treadmill was duly installed in the cage. The bird, though initially uninterested in the treadmill, took to it after some coaxing from the owner. Walking on the treadmill was at least a novel experience compared to walking around in circles.

  It is the nature of novelty, however, to wear off. The bird’s sadness returned in a few months. The owner spent a lot of time talking to the bird. She believed that the bird felt lonely. She thought if she spent more and more time talking to it, the bird could be yanked out of its bad moods. The bird listened patiently to her owner’s words, never chirping anything much in return.

  One day, as the owner was again telling the bird how much she loved her, how much the bird means to her, what a beautiful bird the bird was, how its presence lit up the owner’s life, and gave it meaning, the bird interrupted her. The bird said to its owner, in its own bird language – but a language her owner had by now come to understand, more or less – it said to her owner, ‘You say that you love me, but is love supposed to be a golden cage, where the bird’s existence is defined by its being a source of joy for its owner?’

  The owner was completely thrown by this question. While she could understand, she did not have the laryngeal resources to speak the bird’s language. Plus she had her own fears to contend with, as she had by now constructed her entire life around her pet. The owner tried to pretend not to understand what the bird was chirping to her in response to her words of love. But her instant reaction to the bird’s question – the way the expression on her face changed – gave the lie to her attempted pretension. The bird, with typical animal intuition, knew, and she knew the bird knew, that she had understood her pet’s reasonable, if devastating, query.

  Every time the owner came to the cage to coo her usual sweet nothings to the bird – what the bird now recognized as ‘bird talk’ essentially, though not something to be dismissed as meaningless, or without significance as a gesture of love and connection – the bird posed to her the same question: ‘Is love supposed to be a golden cage, where the bird’s existence is defined by its being a source of joy for its owner?’

  The owner, who loved the bird very much, began to get anxiety attacks every time she approached the cage. Her pulse rose, her palms got clammy, her mouth turned dry, beads of sweat formed on her upper lip. Her body trembled every time the bird, which she loved to pieces, broached the subject of flight.

  Words failed her as she tried to give a form and a shape to her fears, fears she was too ashamed to articulate even to herself: What if her pet flew away and did not come back – would it not then signify that what she had liked to imagine till date as her ‘love’ was anything but for the bird? What would she do then with an empty cage hanging in her room? Who will chirp to her every morning? Who would she speak to every evening if not to her little bird, her baby?

  The bird was an intelligent bird. It slowly began to understand, from the facial expressions and behaviour patterns of its owner, and from the mismatch between its owner’s words and her actions, that though she meant well, she simply had no conception of flight, and no clue about the existential significance of flight for a bird with wings.

  Flight, the bird concluded, can never mean as much to its owner as it did to the bird itself – not to mention, of course, that flight would mean even more to a caged bird than it would to a ‘free’ or ‘uncaged’ one. The bird did not doubt for a moment that its owner loved it, and loved it more than anyone else in her life. The irony was that though she loved the creature only because it was a bird – a creature defined by the possession of wings, a creature defined by the idea of the capacity for flight – the flight of her loved one was something she could not countenance, for the simple reason that the love whose recipient the bird was, was the love of someone who could never fly. Hands are limbs, yes, but not wings.

  The bird, which also loved its owner a lot, was pained by the effect its question had on the owner. So, seeing its owner’s sad, tear-choked face day after day, the bird thought, if my owner’s happiness depends so much on me living my entire life within a cage, what’s wrong in finding meaning in a life without flight?

  After all, not all b
irds are meant to fly. Maybe, thought the caged bird, I am only a Kiwi bird that thinks it’s an eagle or a nightingale just because it found itself in a cage. If I had grown up in the wild, I would know what I was: a bird that cannot fly. Who knows, perhaps my wings are not the kind to produce flight. Who knows, even if my owner sets me free, all I’d be able to do is hop about vainly, and comically, before realizing she had been right all along – I am not meant for flight. What I am born for is not flight but love. I should be happy that I have a golden cage and an owner who truly loves me.

  But all its rationalizations notwithstanding, the bird could not totally kill the nagging doubt: what if it could really fly? What if it was a swallow, a bird that could not just fly, but navigate oceans?

  The years passed, the caged bird grew older. As it grew older, its doubts lost their potency. Its dreams of flight atrophied. And then, one monsoon day, it was perched in its cage, gazing absent-mindedly at the window it had never flown out of. Perhaps it was wondering what rain drops felt like – did they sting as they fell on outstretched wings? Did they tickle? Or did they produce pleasurable sensations as they turned to water and trickled away? As the bird was musing thus, its unseeing eyes fixed on a branch outside the window, a magnificent bird swooped down from the sky and alighted gracefully on that very branch, on the very spot the bird had been staring at.

  The caged bird was stunned to see this beautiful creature – they had the exact same plumage, were the same colour, the same size, and when it sang, its notes sounded exactly like the bird’s own.

  That evening when the bird’s owner came home from work, she could sense, even as she turned the key in the lock, that something was amiss. Missing was the anticipatory pitter-patter that greeted her when she reached the door.

  Her heart pounding, she undid the latch with unsteady hands. She rushed to the room where the cage was. Her worst fears had come true: the cage was open. It was empty. Her little bird had taken flight.

  As she moved toward the cage, she felt something crunch underfoot. She looked down. It was the body of her loved one. Her little bird had attempted to fly – without telling her, without asking her. But its useless wings could not bear its weight, could not carry it out of the room even. It had fallen like a terrestrial, heavily, clumsily, on the hard, unexpected floor. A bird killed by flight. For a fraction of a second, the caged one had tasted flying, even if it was only falling.

  The owner picked up the limp body of the bird, now finally out of the cage. She carried the body to the terrace of her house, nearly tripping on the stairs at one point. Up there, on the rooftop, the owner of the bird contemplated the sky, her rival. It was the sky which had snatched her loved one from her, enticed it with promises of flight.

  The owner of the bird turned away from the sky, her eyes shut in a tight scream. When she looked down, her tears traversed several stories and came to rest on a small patch of earth, darkening it just a little.

  ACCESS DENIED

  I’ve been having my wife’s dreams over and over and over again. All the dreams she narrated to me – starting from the first morning we woke up together as husband and wife in the Super-Deluxe Luxury Capsule on the upper deck of the Aryabhata-16 Sleeper Shuttle we’d taken to consummate our lunar nuptials, all the way to our last morning together four years later at our high-security Chhattarpur farmhouse fortified with 9,000-mm-wide moat of hydrochloric acid and fourteen watchtowers, every one of them manned by NSG commandos on deputation from VVVIP duty, every one of them clad in NIJ Level IIIA armour, every one of them equipped with StG 44s, Beretta 418s, and 9k34 Strela 3s – I’ve been dreaming, in chronological order.

  What’s really freaking me out is that the dreams are the exact same ones my wife shared with me – frame to frame, with exact same characters, exact same locations, exact same visual style with exact same camera angles, jump cuts, slow-mo and stop-motion effects, bleached monochrome sequences, exact freeze frames and with the exact same 4,000p HD picture quality she described to me every morning over fifty shades of earl grey tea while pandiculating all through her narration like the bored 900-year-old immortal that she was until I was forced to kiss her irresistible maxillary cuspids till my oral commissures bled.

  And the dreams come to me not only in my sleep but at any time, seemingly at random, and with no warning or sense of falling asleep. I might be in the middle of a game of tennis, serving, and the dream would kick in. My body would be standing there on the court, waiting for the serve toss to come down, and boom – the mind has logged out and logged in to another site. In a fraction of a picosecond, her .exe files would have deactivated my reality-testing filters and reset the default settings of my OS to the frequency of an alternate reality. And I would live this induced reality with as much of a sense of seamless thisness and blemishless being and wrinkle-free time and habitual earnestness as I do the real world, and not until the dream ends, abruptly, with my waking up, can I figure out I’d been in a dream all along.

  No matter how much I try to mentally prepare myself for the next oneiric seizure, I can never manage to carry over the critical awareness of my waking self and the realization that I am about to be abducted into a dream, into the dream itself – and this, as you can imagine, can be really frustrating, and all things taken into account, very disruptive of your normal day-to-day functioning.

  The experts I’ve been to have been unable to come up with a clear, coherent diagnosis. But what I suspect from all my interactions with them is that these dreams are probably triggered by some hormone or neurochemical, which, in turn, was probably triggered by something I do or say or think or remember that I haven’t been able to pin down so far. And this hormone or neurochemical is setting off some kind of massive synaptic chain reaction that collectively produces these dreams which are, basically, the verbal narrations of my wife’s dreams reverse-translated by my brain into the original form in which they were first manufactured by my wife’s consciousness.

  I have lived with the disruptions of these dreams for some time now. But what is now making them even more disruptive than they have been so far is the permanent damage they are inflicting on my reality filters. As a result, I am finding it more and more difficult to distinguish the real world from the dream world, and often tend to confuse the one for the other – a common feature of garden variety psychoses.

  There is this dream, for instance, in which I am a cursor on my wife’s laptop screen, and I keep getting pushed around by her fingers. Every time her fingertips hit the keyboard of her MacBook, I jump. And the faster she types, the quicker and further I jump. If I get tired and do not move as fast as she wants me to, she would order my termination. A hundred electron-tipped Israeli LAHATs are fired from an aircraft carrier in the C-drive and head straight for my head, and it’s when they are about to pierce my skull that I wake up, sweating. And I realize with relief it was just a dream. That I’m not really a cursor. And I get up from bed and open the window only to see a LAHAT crash into the apartment complex opposite mine, and that’s when I wake up, screaming. And I realize with relief that it was all just a dream and that LAHATs are not really being fired at my residence and I go to the bathroom and lift the toilet seat and commence peeing and am horrified to find that my jet of urine, instead of proceeding directly, and as per the dictates of gravity, down into the pool at the centre of the bowl is instead shooting upward, straight to the ceiling, and the gall stones in the urine are so hard and sharp they drill a hole in the ceiling and pierce the anus of the DG, ATS who lives upstairs, in the apartment above mine, and who had barely five seconds earlier settled his massive posterior on the pot and unfolded the special supplement on suppositories that the Times of HAIR had launched in collaboration with the Association of Suppository Sellers and after impaling the DG, ATS, my jet of urine drills through the ceilings of the bathrooms of all the nine apartments on each of the nine floors above mine, killing, in all, ten individuals including the DG, ATS. The hard metallic stream of urine perfora
ted and bore through, in all, seven brains, eight lungs, nine livers, seventeen kidneys, seven tongues, five uteri, fifteen thighs, three penises, fifteen hands, nine eyes, six hearts, nine intestines and three gall bladders. Of course, other parts of the body were punctured on the way as well, but these were the body parts that registered themselves in the dream. And then it comes out through the roof of the fifteen-storey residential condo and shoots upward into the sky and, at an altitude of 29,000 feet, it hits the fuselage of a Malaysian Airlines flight MH97 that happens to be in its path, killing all 277 passengers and thirteen crew on board, and then proceeds straight into the stratosphere and then into outer space where it immediately heads for Asgaard and once it reaches Asgaard, it solidifies and becomes the rainbow bridge. And every time a vehicle crosses the rainbow bridge, the solidified jet stream transmits the vibrations all the way back to my penis and one day when my penis is inside this Italian woman who is inside this trial room at Pantaloon inside this shopping mall on the outskirts of Cuneo where the city dips into a different level of plateau, the vibrations make me come inside her instead of, as per the understanding, me performing coitus interruptus and coming on her belly or thighs and she’s so pissed off and angry I came inside her because she wasn’t on the pill or using any contraception that she opens her purse and whips out a Magnum and shoots my penis and the impact of the bullet, from such close range, on my penis, is such that it is felt, via the rainbow bridge, all the way back in Asgaard where the King of Asgaard, who happened to be at that precise moment standing on the bridge and leaning on the rather low railing, loses his balance and tumbles off the bridge to his death in the waters of Oblivion and because an earthling has caused the death of their King, Asgaard declares war on planet Earth and when the King of Earth, who is the American President, hears of it, he gets very agitated and asks the CIA to rendition me and bring me in for enhanced interrogation and when three Glock-wielding CIA operatives come to my home and ring the bell, I can’t open the door because I’m stuck in the bathroom with my jet stream of urine going all the way to Asgaard and they break open the door and rush into the bathroom and find me trapped with penis in hand and the jet of solidified piss rising from it and they use their satellite phones to update Langley and when the President comes to know he calls up the HAIR Prime Minister who, in turn, calls up the NSA and when they learn that I have killed the DG, ATS they send in the STF to arrest me and when the STF come they find me trapped in my bathroom surrounded by CIA agents with my penis in hand and my piss stretching all the way up to Asgaard, and it’s finally decided that the only way to save the earth and the earthlings from the wrath of the Asgaardians, who are a way more advanced civilization than us and way more powerful technologically and militarily, besides being close allies of the hyperintelligent haemorrhoids, and would basically have us all for breakfast and not even burp given that they’re gods and we’re just stupid mortals, is to prevent them from coming to Earth and the sole way to do that being to break the rainbow bridge and so they call the world’s leading diamond cutters and cutting technicians to cut off the solidified jet stream somewhere at the stratospheric level but the stream being too hard and too broad for any cutting machine to make any impact, they opt to cut it at its weakest and softest part which, of course, happens to be the shaft of my penis and I lodge a protest at this decision for it could permanently impair my normal sexual and micturitional functions, not to mention the social and cultural stigma associated with an individual who has had his penis separated from his person, but I’m told that I need to weigh my selfish concerns against the future of the entire planet, the future of human civilization, the human race itself, as also all the species of flora and fauna that have taken millennia to evolve to their current stage and all of which would be destroyed if I did not sacrifice my penis and the best thing for everyone would be that I agree to voluntarily sacrifice my penis for the greater common good rather than them having to forcibly do the deed on me and, somehow, though I can see their point about saving the planet, human civilization, etc., I tell them what use is human civilization if one man’s penis means so little to them and what use is human civilization if I am to live in it without a vital body part and so on so forth and refuse to comply until the American President and the HAIR Prime Minister sign the final order and a military surgeon with a surgical knife is sent to my bathroom and three CIA goons hold me down while the surgeon applies his knife to my penis and begins to slice, and that’s when I wake up screaming and realize with relief it was all just a dream and I get up from bed and wear my home slippers and call up KT who’s my area’s MLA for whom I’d campaigned, and he says he’ll have to call me back ’cos he’s in the middle of supervising a communal riot in P— and if I want to burn a few Ms and rape hot teens I better get my ass to P— fast and though I don’t want to burn or rape anybody, I’d never seen a live riot before, and I immediately get ready and drive down to P— and sure enough, I find KT addressing a gathering of 300 men, all dressed in full formals made of newspaper and they each wore an octopus on their head so it looked like they had ten arms each instead of two and their ten arms held trishuls, talwars, rampuris, torches, lathis, cycle chains, hammers, lances, rags soaked in kerosene, and smart phones, and they were all listening patiently to KT who was telling them basically that it was human nature to kill and rape from time to time and there was nothing right or wrong about it, they should not let anyone make them feel guilty about what was their natural right and evolutionary duty wherein they were, as the stronger race, entitled to exercise their strength by wielding it on the lesser races and eliminating them and impregnating them with their stronger seed and punishing those who, ignorant of their status in the evolutionary order, mistakenly tried to resist and they should never forget their real true dharma and should therefore kill with kindness and rape with compassion and if they felt a candidate deserved some additional torture or cruelty they should not hesitate to go the extra mile and do the needful so that nobody can in the future blame them for not having done their duty, that eleven buses were waiting for them to take them to the battleground and he wished them all the best and said Jai Mata Di and then he came to me and asked one of his PAs to get me an octopus and the rest of the kit and I said no, I don’t want to be a part of this, I only wanted to come and watch and he said sure, they also serve who only stand and watch, but to be able to watch even, I had to be fully kitted out in their gear and so ended up wearing the octopus on my head – which wasn’t a real octopus as I’d imagined but one made of latex and carbon fibre and was battery-operated with controls that plug into your mouth and was meant purely to provide a convenient means to carry all the tools for the assignment but the moment I wore the octopus one of the tentacles went and on its own – or because I’d moved my tongue the wrong way over the controls – grabbed my scrotum and began applying pressure on it until I screamed in pain and woke up and realized with relief it was all a dream, and this time I was so terrified – terrified not so much of the dreams as of being duped once again into mistaking dream for reality – that I decided I’d just sit down at my desk and start writing all this down, and that’s what I’m doing now and I still am not sure whether me writing this is happening in my dream or real life and whether you reading this is happening in my dream or in the world of my real life, and in any case I’ve decided that the safest thing for me to do would be to keep doing what I’m doing right now which is just writing and as long as I’m writing nothing bad can happen to me, can it, and so I kept writing, typing and typing on my laptop and then one day when my laptop crashed I began to scribble into my notebook and then one day when my notebooks were all filled up I began writing on the walls of my home and one day when the walls of my home were filled up with words I began writing on the floor and one day when the floor too was filled up with words I opened the door and began writing on the staircase and then on the sixth floor my last crayon ran out, and I decide to go to the supermarket nearby to get myself 500 boxes of cr
ayons, ball pens, chalk, pencils, and while I was at it, I tell the guy at the Apple showroom who also repaired laptops to repair my laptop, and so I go back into my flat to get my laptop and find that I cannot enter because the floor is covered with my words and I can’t take a step without erasing bits and pieces of what I’ve written and I decide to tiptoe by stepping only in the spaces between the words and in the spaces between the lines and I try my best not to teeter and rub off a word or a punctuation mark by mistake and then I hit upon the idea of photographing the entire floor before I walk on them so as to preserve my writings in advance in case they are accidentally destroyed and I start taking pictures of my floor with my cell phone but since its only a 5 megapixel camera and my handwriting is barely legible even to myself and my letters are way too small I have to go down on my hands and knees and get the cell phone camera real close to the floor to be able to shoot in such a way that the writing can be read but it takes me twenty-two shots to cover just one square feet while my flat is a sumptuous 1,600 sq. feet carpet area, which I had bought at the insistence of the wife when what I’d really wanted was a simple 800 sq. ft and if I’d gone with my original plan I’d not have found myself in the situation I do today where I have to take twenty-two multiplied by 1,600 or 35,200 photographs to preserve my work and the very thought of it is so exhausting and ridiculous I shake my head in dismay and end up losing my balance and fall on my ass on a patch of floor I had not yet photographed and smudge out maybe 800 words, and because I am such a perfectionist, this loss pisses me off so much I decide it doesn’t matter anymore and I get up and begin to walk normally as if there were no words on the floor and proceed to my study to get my laptop, and as I walk back to the door I notice that my footprints on the floor are all blank spaces of wordlessness, and if you find gaps and ellipses in my narrative you know now how they got there at the laptop shop who do I see but the three CIA agents who had tried to sever me from my penis and before I could react they jump on me and blindfold me and bundle me into a black Ford Endeavour with tinted glasses and take me to a black site two hours from my locality in south Delhi when they remove the blindfold I am standing in a huge empty hall like one of the multiplex auditoriums except the rows of seats here stopped quite some distance from the screen, leaving a large space at the front to my right was an apparatus that looked like a high-backed throne-like metallic toilet bowl fitted with armrests and a lobster-like metal contraption with claws and different-sized rings and wires and electrodes protruding from it then these two goons in military fatigues come up and strip me naked and push me down on the toilet seat and strap me to it with metallic clasps when I look up there’s a film playing and I realize it is porn – and porn of very high quality in terms of both artistes as well as picture quality, as in I had never seen porn on such a big screen before then the goon brings the metal contraption up closer to my crotch and runs a half-metallic, half-rubber tubing around my penis and turns a switch on, causing a low hum while simultaneously the lights all go out, plunging the hall in darkness except for the light coming from the big screen and the red light blinking on my contraption and as my attention sort of by default goes to the action on the screen, my unit begins to stir and expand and rise maybe a couple of centimetres and I almost jump out of my seat in shock as my penis in response to the action on the big screen had expanded and risen and made physical contact with the heated filament which ended up burning it instantly, causing it to shrink and revert to its default flaccid state, and now that I had figured out what their torture technique was, I resolved not to watch the porn anymore and shut my eyes, but of course I could not shut my ears and the extremely evocative moans of the gifted female artistes combined with the sounds of sucking and slurping and kissing and thighs slapping against bottoms proved too much for my poor penis which, having forgotten its painful lesson of a few minutes ago, again began to expand and arch up only to yet again end up having its foreskin burnt, with the only positive being that on both occasions the tip thankfully did not come in contact, and as I had no means of stopping my ears, I had to resort to all kinds of mental measures to try and erect thought barriers so as to prevent my penis from making the same mistake all over again, and I tried visualizing everyone and everything, starting from a mug shot of Mother Teresa to the Lord Shiva to the gooey mass of eggplant curry to bovine faecal matter but all to no avail, and I can tell you now that under certain circumstances anything with a form or a shape can be sexually arousing no matter what the form or shape is, and as my penis expanded again, rose incrementally, sweeping aside my asexual and anti-sexual visual erections like an Optimus Prime flicking skyscrapers out of his path, I was so sure and so consumed by horror at the prospect of a third encounter with the Ring, I shrieked in anticipatory agony and woke up, relieved that it was all just a dream and I wasn’t actually about to have my penis branded and then and there I decided I wasn’t going to change any of the physical circumstances surrounding my current condition of non-dream real-life reality so as to completely eliminate all risk of ending up in my wife’s horrible dream world again by something I did or said or remembered, and I was going to stay absolutely still and repeatedly chant the mantra that my Guru whispered in my ear seven years ago so long as I lived, and I won’t even open my eyes and look so as not to let in any untoward visual stimulus into my OS and have it trigger another round of randomly horrifying experiences, and I lay in my bed absolutely still, with my eyes shut and barely breathing and chanting the mantra and in due course, when I felt hungry and thirsty and wanted to go to the bathroom I ignored all the physical bodily urges and soiled my bed and stayed exactly in the same position in which I’d woken from my last dream and wept tears of relief and as the hours passed and days passed my bed began to stink of urine and faeces and flies began to graze on me I was still not ready to leave my bed and the phone rang and the doorbell rang and rang and rang repeatedly and relentlessly and I was still not going to open my eyes or leave my bed and time passed and I tried my best not to lose consciousness so as to save myself from dreaming but my body had become so weak by then I lost consciousness and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a clean bed in a hospital kind of antiseptic place with white-skirted nurses flowering in the corridors and my brother walked in with a doctor type and the doctor type said my brother wanted to have a private chat with me, this brother who hadn’t spoken to me in several years and the thought of having to spend time in the same physical space as this brother so horrified me I closed my eyes and screamed and screamed, and when I opened my eyes I was still in the same bed and my brother was still there, though looking anxious and scared and disappointed at the same time, and I knew then that this was no ordinary dream but a maximum security facility and it wasn’t going to be easy to get out of.