Chapter 23

The trouble with dreams is that most of those are not remembered once we wake up. I am glad my counselor at the rehab facility, Unni, made me continue writing journal entries. Once I started writing down, even those little bits I happened to remember, for some mysterious reason, I started remembering more and more - of the dreams I was having.

I read somewhere that we sleep to dream although there’s the other opinion that sleeping is a rest for the mind. The more I wrote, the more I remembered, and a strange thing started happening: even the strangest of dreams made me joyous as I ran through them in my mind during my waking hours.

Sometimes on consecutive nights I would dream of falling from high places but inexplicably I never reached the hard ground; I will always swing up as if I was bungee jumping. So those high-flying dreams were exhilarating, too.

One night I dreamt one of those elusive lucid dreams. I remember flying up from my bed and hover over several feet from the ground. I saw myself floating over streets, the traffic sluggish below me. I have to say that flying was one of the most exciting dreams I had. This particular dream ended with me coming back to my apartment, floating through the window, and gently lying down on my mattress. I didn’t have a bed because it took unnecessary space and there was no need for it when I had a comfortable mattress which I can put against the wall and use the space as my studio because I was living in a studio apartment during that time in one of the islands off the mainland.

It was where Agar first exposed his penis to me. I don’t know why. I was sipping my beer and he was too but he took a break and went to the loo. When he came over to me, I saw that he had not zipped his fly and was letting his well-hung cock swing from side to side.

I was sitting and he was standing and he came close to me without bothering to sit in his chair. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do but I supposed that he was proudly displaying the fact that he had an uncut cock and knew that where I came from the people of my culture were circumcised. In fact, another friend from his culture once asked me why my community was circumcising males even before we were the age of majority. We had no say in it because my religion demanded that children be circumcised as soon as they were fit for it though this fit-ness was arbitrary: some male children were circumcised even as infants: the parents took them to a hospital to have a convenient circumcision done. At least there was no female genital mutilation. 

I had undergone the cutting off of my foreskin sometime before I became a teenager. I was herded and caught like a chicken by the adult members of my family and I was laid on a table and all these men were standing surrounding me as one of my relatives removed my shorts and exposed my phallus to a complete stranger.

I suppose an anesthetic was given because I didn’t feel any pain when the knife – or whatever sharp object was applied – removed my foreskin. 

But the psychologically troubling factor was that the medic had his sunglasses on. I could see everything he did to my dick reflected from his shades. 

Afterwards there were three days of celebration where I was admitted to a bed and kept there for three days while the only time I was allowed outside of the confines of the bed was to go to pee or poo. 

I don’t know why pissing caused an excruciating pain because my piss slit was still intact. But I remember that the pain made me scared, making me don’t want to urinate anymore. Yet I did. And mercifully those three days were over.

However, there was one thing that lingered on my mind: that for several years I didn’t forgive my family for giving me those three days of unbearable pain. It took long years before I finally empathized with my relatives and accepted the fact that they were brought up along the beliefs of their prevailing time and for them circumcision was thus a religious duty although actually it is not if you bothered to study my faith in-depth.

Agar came from an ethnicity famed for their lengthy member. He was the first I actually got to see and I saw that he was uncut and when he stood near me, I thought he was proudly displaying his well-endowed manhood to me.

I saw that his foreskin was covering only half his glans. His meatus was half open and I wondered why. 

He stayed near me like that for about a minute and I wondered what I was supposed to do next. I didn’t want to perform fellatio on him because I didn’t have any lust for him. I only had a platonic love for him. So what I did next was to check why his foreskin didn’t cover his cockhead all the way down.

I reached over and started pulling his foreskin back and just as I was about to expose his whole glans, he giggled, withdrew his penis from my hand, and pushed it back into his Levi’s and zipped up.

He then sat down and continued to sip the remainder of his beer. 

Coming back to my dreams, dreams are interpreted in so many ways in so many cultures that by the time I was 40 years old, I had altogether stopped caring what dreams were and what they mean or represent.