The dangers of sleep.

Have you ever given any thought to how very vulnerable you are when you give yourself over to sleep in the company of another person? Even being married to that other person is no guarantee of safety – ask Wayne Bobbitt! Dozing off must be the most trusting act within the range of human experience, and yet millions upon millions of us do it on a nightly basis, and many of us even take tablets to make sure we stay asleep, vulnerable, and unarousable beside someone else for a good many hours.

Traditionally the hours of darkness are considered to be the scariest segment of each 24 hour period of our lives, when malevolence stalks the earth in the form of thieves, murderers, rapists and, I hear, the troubled souls of the dead. Now ghosts don’t bother me, and there’s not a lot I could do if they were to pay me any unwanted attention in my sleep, but thieves and marauders are another matter.

The vexed issue of night time vulnerability raised itself in my mind recently when someone reminded me of a childhood experience that, till then, had lain dormant somewhere in that part of my mind reserved for happenings I have no use for or would prefer to forget, an experience that thankfully had no traumatic effect on me….. I think.

I was 8 years old. My family was on holiday, staying with friends, but the house was small so while my father, younger brother and myself piled into the spare room, my mother and baby brother stayed with other friends up the road. That first night we were exhausted from the three day drive over roads that had been all but washed away in torrential rain, and we fell asleep easily in spite of the excitement of being on holiday and playing with friends we hadn’t seen for over a year.

Next morning when I woke my eight year old head knew something was wrong. My brain was all fogged over, I had a strange taste in my mouth and I sensed an unpleasantness which I first associated with wakening into a room where the walls and windows and door were all in the wrong place. Had I known the word disorientation I might have used it. The first concrete evidence that proved to me that this was more than just unfamiliarity brought on by sleeping in a strange room was that my watch was gone. Something had to be seriously amiss because that watch was my prize possession, a birthday present, and it only ever came off on bath night and was the first thing to be put on as soon as I got out of the water.

As I began to process the discovery of my loss in my hazy thinking my father woke and then my brother. They too had sore heads and bleary vision, and found difficulty focussing for a while. I could only sit and watch as my father looked around the room with anxiety and concern on his face, concern that soon turned into realisation, resignation and annoyance. After he surveyed the new country that we had woken into he gave us the strangely reassuring information that we had been robbed but that the robbers had gone and everything was alright.

The favoured method of thievery in that part of Central Africa at the time had been successfully applied to us, people who had just arrived in the city from the countryside and who liked to sleep with the windows flung open on humid, oppressive nights. The operation involved a gang of thieves. Some of them had the task of making sure the victims stayed asleep while the others fleeced the room. To keep us asleep cloths doused in some noxious vapour were held over our mouths and noses, and when the fleecing had been completed they left as easily as they had arrived and we were well and truly fleeced. The even more unpalatable detail that I didn’t learn of until much later was that these gangs usually operated totally naked, leaving all their clothes in the garden of the house they were robbing, and smearing themselves with grease so that if a victim woke they would have nothing of the burglar’s to grab hold of (that they were prepared to touch), and he could slip away easily.

Fortunately, and we should always look on the bright side, although we lost all our clothes, watches, wallets, sense of security and everything else, we survived being anaesthetised, and most of our belongings had been stored in the house our mother was staying in with the baby, and so far as I know our bodies were not tampered with.

Although the memory of all this hasn’t surfaced in over 40 years, it makes me think of all the occasions when I have drifted off into sweet unconsciousness in the company of strangers: on buses, trains and airplanes, in hostel dormitories and doss houses, in railway stations, on park benches and in doorways, vineyards and derelict buildings in towns, cities and open countryside all over the world as was my practice during my years of voluntary impoverishment as I travelled here and there with little money. Yet for all that irresponsible risk-taking and foolhardiness, the only time I’ve been robbed was as a child, safely tucked up in bed in a friend’s house with my father only feet away.

Bush Dentist.

Today's dental treatment was bearable enough. The cleaning out of the excavated root was pretty painful but I just concentrated on remembering how magnificently dreadful the pain was when I used to have dental treatment on the living room table when I was growing up 500 miles and more from a qualified dentist in Africa.

We had to make do with a man who "did a wee bit of dentistry" in his spare time as well as veterinary work, plumbing and preaching. He lived 350 miles from us and called every few months for one reason or another.

The big problem was that we had no electricity so he hitched his drill up to my mother's treadle sewing machine which my father then operated while the "dentist" did his thing in my mouth.

You'll do anything if the pain is severe enough.

The picture is of garlic freshly lifted from the ground, not a tooth recently pulled from my jaw.