Dreamboat

Dreamboat: My best kept secret
Everyone has their own way of dealing with the chaos in their world. For some people, it is
partying, dancing, singing and twirling in the bathroom or touching themselves in places that
matter to them. Some people run mad on social media, ranting and tweeting and WhatsApping,
checking and updating statuses and snapchatting and applying Instagram filters to their already
pampered faces. In the case of some people, it is all of these at once. For me, it is sleeping; a
dreary, almost-eternal kind of sleep that snuffs life from me for an entire day, days or even a
week. It is not the ordinary kind of sleep, you can imagine. It is something ethereal, subliminal, a
silence that stills the storm on the outside but stirs a bustling world inside my imagination. It is a
kind of sleep that makes the heaven in my mind abruptly nudge itself to life.
Before the Sleep, my body gathers signs onto itself like clouds suck in vapours. Almost always, I
feel my body lifting from the ground, sending signals to my head, making the air around me feel
lighter, softer, more cushioned than it normally is. When I drink water, I can almost taste the
condensed sunlight and moonbeam that drowns the fluid in me and causes a belch to erupt from
the pit of my stomach. When I eat, I do not feel the taste of the food, all I feel against the palate
of my mouth is congealed semen mixed with vanilla. When I lay down to the bed, I want to stay
longer, to sink into the comfort of the soft foam, of my naked body touching the prickly surface
of the already threading bedsheet; in fact, as soon as I touch body to bed, my vagina becomes
wet without my fondling with it, without my pleading or poking hands or singing lullabies in
form of porn videos. When all these begin to happen, when my head begins to feel light in a way
that makes everything I see or hear fall to the ground like dangling yoyo, I know Sleep is
coming.
Do I do anything to stop Sleep? No. The truth is, normally, there is nothing I can do.
You see, something often preempts this Sleep, just like death is triggered by life or a sickle cell
crisis is often precipitated by cold, stress, mosquito, hunger, loneliness or just the sheer action of
blinking one’s eyes and not dying yet. For Sleep, it could be anything too, the tiredness that
comes with keeping awake, keeping healthy or the weariness that accompanies doing the right
things all the time. My Brain starts by asking itself, “Shorty, how many times this week have you
wasted so much time doing nothing?” “Just once, twice?” “Nah, that is just too bad.” “Let’s do
something to wake the bad girl up, what do you say, Shorty?”
My Brain is terrible like that. She is lazy, fat, always stealing tomorrow from today, bristling
with tar, yearning for danger, stroking thunder, seeking relief from bliss.Forget my young, dumb, broke Brain; most often, it is the chaos in the world that jolts me out of
the world as we know it and plunges me into a world I only know of. You know, it is no longer a

secret that the world is on its deathbed, writhing in pain, saying its last prayer but still trying to

save its last breath in order to put its house in order (as if that is ever possible). But sometimes,
he, the world, makes such shrieking, cra noises that make you want to shut your ears and cuss in
utter irritation, “Shut the F up, you old, dying, big yet shriveled asshole.” You want to scream
like this when you hear of terrible murders that could best have been avoided, of rape victims
whose stories make your heart seize in shock, of people dying because of sicknesses that should
have long been obliterated by science or simple boring tales of politicians doing shitty things that
only the Meduse with their jelly-fish brains and octopus forms (I am making reference to Nnedi
Okorafor’s Binti) would have dreamt up. When this chaos reeled out on the news like a broken
talking teddy gets to the height of my emotive faculty and begins to make me sink into
compassion fatigue, my body badly craves Sleep.
Aside: Eilish sang a song about climate change but when I
listen to it, all I hear is “My Lucifer is lonely, standing there,
killing time, can’t commit to anything but a crime… All the
good girls go to hell cos even God herself has enemies, once
the waters start to rise and heaven’s out of sight, she will want
the devil on her team.” - All the Good Girls Go to Hell.
In my Sleep, I dream dreams. Not so much of an accurate description; I spin dreams out of
nothing I am not familiar with and make dreamboats out of everything I know. It is quite hard to
describe what happens in my head as I lay there, on the bed, feigning sleep, but I will try.
So, as soon as I close my eyes, a world emerges. Much like the real world, only it becomes
customised to my taste and preferences. In my conjured world, there are often no skyscrapers or
slums, just bungalows with ultra-modern equipment, a whole lot of space, very peaceful,
nature-filled ambience and tarred roads everywhere. My conjured world has the feels of Google
map photos taken with 3D cameras that makes it possible to see the perimeters of a specific
place. In my dreams, there are people too and cats (if need be). Although there are a lot of
people-ish humdrum, two characters always stand out. The dreamboat and the babe. I have had
one too many dreamboats which are, I must confess, always semblances of real people (I am not
too much of a great artist). It could be one of my favourite Asian Kpop idols due to their
choreographed dance moves (V does it for me always. Korean-speaking, Sweet-Night Inner
Child is synced to my head on a daily). I have also dreamt up way too many Marcuses from
Francine Rivers’ Mark of the Lion trilogy (boy, do I love those novels or what? Rivers might
have wanted the books to draw readers closer to the God of love and all that, but in my sorry
case, they take me to Cloud 9 where only romantic kisses and painstakingly crafted sex scenesexist. So much for misappropriated purposes). I have tried making Trevor Noah a dreamboat but
dude is too old and super intelligent to be locked up in a fantastical world of lovemaking and
fingering and sexual fetishes. I have had some successes with random guys, but they are always
as random as random can be. It is bad luck to dream up someone you are very familiar with; it is
like shitting black, diarrhoeic kind of shit and looking back introspectively to see if the shit came
from your ass. Some people do it but that does not make it A-Okay.
I want an A-okay lucid dream so I think up only random, handsome folks. Once, it was a guy
who breezed past me late at night in one of the school’s elevators like a sultry melody whose
chords you pretty much enjoyed but forgot just as soon as it stopped playing. He had a scar
somewhere on his face, I have forgotten the exact position but I remember thinking that he
carries himself in a way that makes the scar look good. Also, for a long time, it used to be a guy
who taught me nothing I did not already know. He calls himself a lecturer, educated, married,
with kids, having a loft for a house, but I just think he is a semi-old pervy dude who has no clue
about the world and whose broad smile and parchy, puny white beard makes him have this weird
sex appeal that unknots screws in my head and, by extension, in the head of the female
protagonist I dream up. For some months, he has been my perfect dreamboat. He is always in
love with a female student who is in love with nobody. But, this changes after she spins around
in 360 degrees - school, work, failed relationships, work, family issues, more failed relationships

• and finds him still there, standing at the same spot, waiting for her. This time, Sleep decides
  that my dreamboat has to be young, really young and sexy and risque, for a change.
  So, as I got lulled to Sleep by my brain, I told myself, I am going on a long, lifeless journey
  which I will regret when I come back to life, a journey that will reward me with nothing but cost
  me everything. So, I might as well make the best out of it; I am going to dream up the greatest
  love story ever told. So, to make my drowsy fairytale perfect or near perfect, I make my
  dreamboat the perfect doppelganger of Timothee Chalamet (Apart from Asa Butterfield, this is
  the only other time I have cast an actor in my Sleep world. I naturally feel nothing for actors
  whose ever-changing roles and unsavoury behind-the-scenes make my eyes flurry. But
  somehow, Timothee, with his dreamy eyes, Hellenistic cheekbone, Peter-pan curly hair and
  warily thin torso feels different on my tongue, on my skin, in my head. This is most
  embarrassing to even write about so I will skip to the middle. Dreamboat meets some girl who
  does not have to be me, but must look like me.
  He likes her for a while. He wants to tell her but cannot can. He is too stupid to be making small
  talks about romantic affections. Blah. Blah. Blah.