My Mate's a Ninja
on Blog From Beyond (Rwanda), 08/Jan/2010 09:16, 34 days ago
Some years back I was with a guy called Phil (of theAussie posts- which I must finish updating one day), these are his brother (vocals/guitar) and best mates, brothers Simon (at the computer) and Gareth (Ninja). Keep your eye out forRubberwiz, they rock :opRight well, what's 2010 had in store so far?Nightmares.Plenty of rated-18, graphic, multi-colour surround-sound nightmares!They started a couple of weeks back and came to a major head on Monday when I had the worst one. I dreamed I was in a clean, brick room like the old mental asylums. There were two beds. I was in one, in a white nightie, and people kept coming and going from the bed next to me. They were performing experiments where they forced the patient to swallow a metal paperclip laced with cyanide or some such poison which caused an agonizing death.They flicked a switch on entering the room and the light on the wall told them who to give the paperclip to and it was always the person in the other bed, not me. Then a really dear friend came in - someone I've known for years (my friend Daniel from college) and sat in the bed opposite and I'm feeling very cold because I know he's going to die when they make him swallow the paperclip.Then they come in and flick the switch and the light for my bed comes on. It's me this time and I'm sick with fear as they come forward and force my mouth open and put this paperclip in my mouth and I'm gagging on it, determined not to swallow because I know I'll die if I do. So there's this struggle and I manage to bend the clip a little in my mouth and cough and gag and choke and cry that I can't swallow it.And somehow this works! Nurse Ratched walks in and gives me a stern look then says she'll put me to work in the kitchen. So I escape death to become a slave, scrubbing the floors and being damn grateful for it, scared that at any minute they'll drag me back and try again.As I'm being dragged from the room to the kitchen, I look over at Daniel, he's really nervous and sweating and can't look me in the eye. I think it's because he's scared but then I realise he'd done it on purpose: changed the machine so I would be picked instead of him. I can't blame him but I feel really betrayed.There was loads more to this dream I'm sure but that's what I vividly remember.Next thing I know, I've taken my head off and placed it between my feet. I'm wearing a motorcycle helmet which I remove in order to scratch my head because it itches. Inside the helmet I see larvae of some sort and attribute the itch to these little mites. I start washing it with soap and scratching the eggs off the inside of the helmet. Then I examine my hair (on my head between my feet) and notice white fungi around the roots (like the white patches kids get on their scalp in Africa). I start trying to pick this away and then have a revelation. My head is between my feet, my face looking behind me, yet I can see forward! Surely I should be seeing through my eyes, but my eyes are on my head....so how am I looking at myself...?This completely weirds me out for a while. I can't figure it out. If I lift my head and wobble it, my vision wobbles, but I'm still looking down at my head from a headless body.Then somehow I end up at the American Embassy movie night in Kigali, only it isn't the Embassy - but it is (in the weird way familiar things look unfamiliar in dreams sometimes). An epic dream ensued but I don't recall much about it.Then the other night I was having a real intense, almost flirtatious conversation with a man in a black suit and hat, he had very intense eyes. Then a lightning storm came and as the winds and thunder increased I was straining to hear what he was saying. Then lightning hit and he burst like a water balloon and I realised, as he was flowing away, that he had been made of all the seas in the world. It was a beautiful realisation but not a nice dream - it had a very eerie atmosphere to it.Mostly my dreams have involved nasty animals. I was being scratched to pieces by a cat with claws and teeth one night, and another night I was at a lake like the one at Nyarutarama in Kigali and it was full of seething snakes (like the one in Kigali) and they all had teeth and were squirming towards me trying to bite and I had to tie them in knots and throw them back or force them to eat their own tails.Those who know me know my fascination with the link between endogenous and entheogenic chemicals: basically, the drugs our bodies manufacture when we dream, and those that cause similar effects when taken orally. When we dream, our bodies appear to be utilising a form ofDMTwhich is a natural bi-product of our digestive system and also one of the strongest hallucinogens known to man. It's one of the main entheogenic ('god within' - any drug used for a spiritual purpose) drugs of South American Shamans, used in the context ofAyahuasca.Anyway, I remember reading years ago accounts of Ayahuascaros (well, anthropologists who'd met them) and vividly recall that most animals: spiders, snakes, wolves, dragons - are fairly harmless unless they're bearing teeth and/or claws, in which case they're omens of ickyness.So all of these bitey scratcheys are more than a little unsettling.However, dreams aside, the most unnerving thing about all of this by far has been my sleeping position. Since I got back I've been tossing and turning a lot before getting to sleep. Almost every morning I wake laying diagonally across the bed with my feet facing the window.At first I thought this was a North/South issue. It's apparently a 'scientific fact' that we sleep much better if we're laying on a North/South line as opposed to an East/West line. I assumed I must just be trying to re-align. But no. Apparently not. I opened my curtains the other day to check for snow and got back into bed, automatically laying in the same position I'd woken up in because it was comfortable.To my utter amazement, I glanced out the window and saw that my feet were perfectly facing the spire of the village church. It would appear that unless my tootsies point toward the tower, I'm unable to get a decent night's sleep :oOAt some point I'll make a better post about this, but thevillage I come fromis more than a little wyrd:In breaking news. After fretting about the implications of this fortnight of nightmares, I woke this morning laying in the right direction having had a really lovely dream - which I can't remember but it involved my friend Graeme looking at my job CV and essentially nothing creepy happened and no-one died. Win.Let's see where we go from there.I was working yesterday. We had a public consultation with the local Deaf community about the direction of our organisation. Seemed to go really well and it was interesting to hear people's views.Before heading to work on Friday I got a phone call from a job agency who found my CV online and thought they'd found a good match for me in Nottingham as a Project Researcher. They're forwarding my CV so we'll see what comes of that, if anything. But it was still nice to be considered. I honestly didn't really think anybody looked at CVs you upload to online sites, there must be thousands each day. So I'm quite impressed. The job's a one-year contract, but the pay is very nice. Nice enough to keep me in the UK. Plus private-sector project research would be extremely good on my CV for overseas jobs later on. Can't get too into the idea though, just watch and wait.Started reading an interesting book calledWhat Everybody is Sayingand I'm now becoming a body-language buff. Most of it seems to be common sense but there's a few things in there, like the importance of foot direction, that I wasn't aware of before. It's fun to try down the pub. For instance, one of our friends put his feet in the V position as he was about to leave (the direction the angled foot points in is the direction the person intends to leave) - his foot was pointing away from the exit and I was thinking: 'the book said this is the direction he will leave in...but the exit is the opposite direction'. Sure enough, he left in the direction his foot was pointing to go get something, then came back and left through the exit. I was quite impressed by that. It makes perfect sense, but most of the time I guess you're just not aware of it.Oh, and I went for a drink withthat clientwho wanted Sign Language lessons. He was lovely but it was a bit of a weird scenario. Curiosity satisfied.Was supposed to be on a road trip with Cathryn this weekend to see Antonia in Wales and back via Bath to Graeme's - but wasn't to be because of the snow. Will try again when it thaws. It has been snowing a bit here and settling but thankfully not to the point of roads being cut off. Pretty but very cold.Definitely colder than the Virunga mountains right now:Volcanic lava flows unabated in DR.Congo national parkI mean, that is pretty sucky. If you don't get shot by your fellow countrymen, you get blown up by a volcano. Seriously, the DRC ain't the place to be right now.