Patrick Demoucelle, 26 August 2023
Imagine that you’re dreaming…
You’re aboard a super-fast sailing boat out on the open ocean. It’s a racing boat. There are lots of other similar boats around you. It seems to be a competition. You are among the leaders. You’re accelerating over the waves. Surfing. Unbeatable. Confident. Happiness and adrenaline flood your senses. You’re truly living a dream.
Suddenly you hear a ripping sound. You look up and see a tear in the mainsail. The tear widens. You reduce speed and the tear stays the same size. As soon as you hoist the sail into the wind, the tear gets bigger. You have no choice but to slow down and repair the sail. But you can’t find what you need to do so. With a heavy heart, you consider abandoning the race and cut your speed by half.
You watch the whole peloton overtaking you one by one. Some cheer you on, others smirk, most ignore you. And in five minutes, they won’t even be thinking about you. Is this really what you dreamed of?
As your sail continues to tear and you’re still looking in vain for a repair kit, your foot gets caught in a rope and you trip and fall into the water, your foot stuck in the rope. Now you’re being dragged through the water by your own boat. With an incredible effort, you manage to turn around and face forward. You swim back to your boat. There’s no-one to help you: they’ve all overtaken you. It takes you over an hour to get your hand on the rail. Then, after a dozen unsuccessful attempts, you finally manage to haul yourself aboard. Saying to yourself: “I’ve done it… I’m safe and sound”.
That’s when… you wake up (because yes, it really was a dream.)
That’s what happened to me, for real. At that point in the dream, I woke up. At night, in a dark room. With only the light of the emergency room. I seemed to be in a hospital room. Stuck in a bed, poorly dressed, my body askew. It took me a few minutes to work out where I was. The severe pain in my abdomen undeniable. I have spent two days in hospital for surgery. The drip in my left hand is receiving its fourth bag of painkillers for the night. My blood pressure has risen to 18-11, whereas normally I am at 11-6. After two days of (abominable) abdominal surgery (butchery) from the outside, made worse by an unexpected endoscopy from the inside, and other medical trivialities, which, for a patient in bed, are not trivial at all, the doctor comes to see me and tells me that everything went well.
The boat is my body, my life. Sailing is my talent, my skills. The tear is my Parkinson’s. The tool kit to repair it (which I can’t find) is a cure for the disease (which has not yet been found). The rope that makes me fall is my inguinal hernia. And getting back on board requires two days in hospital. What a dream! But in this case it seems that dreams are for real.
So, I thought I’d leave the last word on the real dream, for real, to the doctor:
“Two weeks of convalescence and you can get back to a normal life. “
Because the sail repaired itself?
Correction: in a fortnight, I’ll be back to my life as it was before I fell overboard. A life living in slow motion, with torn talents, left and then overtaken by others, without their help and without a cure, without the tools needed to repair the boat of my dreams, and without the medicine to heal the boat of my life.
My concluding words are harsher than the doctor’s: for 18 years my life has not been normal, and I dream of becoming normal again. To dream, for real. And I intend to continue. And I intend to keep dreaming.
“I do not control my body. But I do control my dreams”.