Me: Good morning, doctor. Herr Doctor - Herr Enemy!
Doctor: Good morning, Mr *********. What have you come to see me about today?
Me: I want to tell you that I sleep for hours and hours, and yet I wake up exhausted. The sleep is so hot, and so pressured - I imagine it's like being down a mine.
Doctor: What are you hoping that I can do for you?
Me: Well, the doctor is a magic box. He prescribes a mouthful of starlight three times a day, or some little crystals that die on the tongue, and abracadabra! Before you know it, you're out of the mine. I don't know why starlight or little crystals work, but they do.
Doctor: Hmmmm, so you're hoping I'll fix you, and then you'll not be the least little bit grateful.
Me: On the contrary. The return to normality is the greatest gift. I'll send you Christmas cards, and I'll talk with you about the weather if I happen to meet you in the street.
Doctor: You're a bloody hypocrite. Always the first to complain when the government makes you pay a penny too much tax, or when a girlfriend wounds you with her eyes. Why me, you say? I don't understand why they tax me! I wish I knew what I'd done to be looked at with such pity! Yet you've no interest in understanding how your own body can be coaxed from sickness!
Me: I admit it, I admit it! It doesn't matter whether I'm cured with an invocation, or with the latest in Swiss pharmaceuticals! If you can stop the nightmares, doctor, then I don't care about anything else.
Doctor: The nightmares, you say? What are these nightmares?
Me: My late grandmother, and one of my ex-girlfriends co-incide in the same dream sequence. The ex-girlfriend is levitating. My tiredness rages like a thirst, and yet I'm scared to go to sleep. There is no rest.
Doctor: Do you not see the beautiful symbolism? What an ordinary mind you have!
Me: You'll have to spell the symbolism out for me, Herr Doctor.
Doctor: They are the ghosts of your mind, fluttering in the unconscious. One dead, and one gone, as imagined by him knocked senseless with sleep. The sleeping mind gives equality to all things - a raindrop is as moving as a poem, and a triangle as frightening as hell raised.
Me: I do not care for the ghosts! Make them stop!
Doctor: Unfortunately they will persist, for there is no medicine.
Me: You mean to say that you can't silence them, or pull them out through my ear? I don't think you're much of a doctor.
Doctor: You are the sum of your past. If I kill the ghosts, I kill you, too. The truth is you must sleep with your ghosts, and make room in the bed for them.
Me: Not even a little sleeping-pill?
Doctor: Medicine is not the answer. Indeed, you are still to formulate the question. Perhaps the ghosts might tell you tonight. Now go - you are wasting my time.
With that, I left the surgery, and the blank ghosts waited just under your author's surface, trapped for now in their prison of natural light.
