Hindustan Times
My wake-up call
The Issue: Waking up
The Soundtrack: All I have to do is dream
I’ve been having mystical experiences. Not only do I hear voices once I’m awake, but I hear voices that tell me, ‘Get up you #*@!er or I’ll be late!’ These, to be honest, were words I would wake up to in that half-drugged, half-very drugged state that I used to experience while, waking up somewhere between 8.30 and 8.55 am every weekday. Those were the days when I would sleepwalk to the shower, sleepwalk into my shoes and clothes (not always in that order) and sleepsit in the back of my car as the driver (What’s the difference between a chauffeur and a driver? Answer: the chauffeur wears a cap or at least a uniform) first dropped my fellow passenger to her office and then dropped me to mine a million miles and almost an hour away.
These days I take the Metro. So I do get up later — say between 9.28 and 9.45. But still, the gumminness, the eyelids that go clang remain. Should I show a doctor? Should I show a therapist? Should I show a therapo-doctor? Or as one wisecrack suggested, should I go to sleep earlier? (I tried that — going to bed at 9 pm. It makes no difference whatsoever if I’m sleeping at 7 pm or 3 am. I still come out of the darkness with my eyes dipped in amniotic fluidy stuff.)
But now, along with the difficulty of creaking my eyes open and keeping them that way, I’m hearing voices. You know, the ones I used to hear in the bad old days. Now, if I had heard someone narrating this story about his or her condition, I would have associated songs like the Beatles’ ‘I’m so tired’ and ‘I’m only sleeping‘ or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Dazed and Confused’ or even Mozart’s great rock’n'roll classic, ‘A little nightmusic’. But instead, all I can think of while sharing my state of acute hypnophilia mixed with early stages of paranoid schizophrenia is the Everly Brothers’ ‘All I have to do is dream’ .
You don’t need to be a Sigmund ‘A Cigar is a Cigar’ Freud to tell you that I do get to listen to this song a lot. At least once a week, I go to the Khan Market dive, Chona’s, for a meltdown with friends that include myself. The CD that they perpetually seem to be playing ends up playing the Everly Brothers’ ‘Dream’ song at least twice. A friend of mine aptly described it as the kind of song that a psychopath will play while carving out the flesh of a girl’s buttocks after killing her. This he normally says when the song is playing while I munch on a kabab platter. But the song does go through my head while I wake up and while I remember waking up. The sweet, too-sweet-to-be-human harmonies of (the still-alive) Don and Phil Everlys singing: “Drea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream/Drea-ea-ea-em, dream, dream, dream/ When I want you in my arms/ When I want you and all your charms/ Whenever I want you, all I have to do is/Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream.”
Which sort of segues in nicely with ‘Get up you #*@!er or I’ll be late!’
(13 votes, average: 4.69 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Indrajit Hazra on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Filed under IndiGestion · Tagged Beatles, Everly Brothers, hear voices, Khan Market, Led Zeppelin, Metro, Mozart, mystical experiences, paranoid schizophrenia, song, wake up
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