In A Different Place

"In another time, on another day, in a different place, would I be different? Would you? Would I be changed? Would you and I come together across oceans of thought, slipping easily through layers of ethereal cloud? Sharing thoughts like this?

Isn’t thought strange? Is it not witness to the fact that there is more than one me? More than one you? The subconscious me, the conscious me, the loving me, the angry me? The happy me, the sad me, the awake me, and the dreaming me… facets of me, yet all somehow incongruous with one another; almost ill fitting.
Take the dreaming me… " - Allen Ansell


Stuart opened his eyes, forcing them to witness the light of day. In his head there still lingered some tenuous strands of the dream, but for a moment or two, while those strands remained, he wasn’t quite sure where he was. This had happened before, and when it had, within seconds his consciousness returned and things were back to normal.

This time, the seconds ticked by, and Stuart found himself in panic, with a coldness skirting over his skin, tingling across the surface of his scalp, for he had no idea where or what he was. He was, for those moments – how long was anyone’s guess – in limbo. It seemed ages before his consciousness caught up with the sync pulses that were the template of his existence, and the placement of the window, the furniture of the room, and the identity of Stuart Kronski overlayed and made sense of the images that were entering his head. Oh yes! Of course… 

Panic over. He was Stuart Kronski; Husband to Maria; Father of one daughter, Jessica; Writer and Broadcaster; Living in Brighton, England, in two-thousand–and-three.

He lay there, still and quiet, waiting for his startled heart to regain it’s composure. That experience, the one that he had just had, was really quite frightening. It brought back to his consciousness another part of the template: Stuart Kronski, fearful of death. 

However he analysed it, this facet made little sense; that he should be fearful of the one certainty in life! It would be understandable to be fearful of the unknown, of what might happen to him in an hour’s time, but to fear what was certain had a ring of stupidity about it somehow.

What was it they said … that a man thinks of sex once every 9 seconds? Could that be true? It was unfathomable. He could generalise that he thought of death once every hour or so, but couldn’t so easily compute the intervals between his thoughts of sex. He excused himself that it was an attempt at rationalising the unknown, of what might happen in that future sixtieth minute, when he indulged himself in the ‘toilet fantasy’.  

Every time he went into the toilet – with its tiny window too low down to see through without stooping – he had this thought that there was someone lurking outside… someone who was going to shoot him dead there and then, mid pee. Wasn’t that absurd? Even more so that this thought entered his mind in every toilet, his own at home, even one in the shopping mall. What on earth gave him such a fantasy? What event in his childhood, caused this improbability to enter his head?

And then there was the other fear. Of leaving those he loved, behind. That was why it was so important to fight this thing. To not give in. To not allow the concept of this illness to gain a stranglehold over his determination. He needed time. Time to finish his life.

He chastised himself: Fancy worrying about being shot in the toilet, when the important thing is to fight this lung cancer!

“Come on now, Stuart… I need you to fill the sample bottle again.”

Patty, the nurse, interrupted his thinking. 

“You can take the drip stand with you if you fancy a walk… Doctor needs to know how well you are washing this chemo through your kidneys.”

Stuart swung his legs over the side of the bed, already gripping the chrome stand of the mobile drip with his left hand. Standing, a little unsteadily, he took the small glass bottle from Patty’s hand, and commenced a slow shuffle/walk combination towards the toilet.

‘One…’ He counted in his head. He’d just had a sexual thought about nurse Patty.

It was remarkably difficult, standing holding the bottle in one hand, maneuvering the other to do the necessary with his ‘bits’ and the fly of his pyjamas.

He didn’t hear it of course. It happened too quickly. The bullet left a very small round hole right bang in the middle of a square of glass between the reinforcing criss-cross wires, and a larger one exactly through his belly button.

And of course this is where I woke up. Thankful that it had been a dream; albeit a dream that seemed so real at the time. I suppose there has to be some reason why we have these kinds of dream, mustn’t there? They must fulfill some purpose in the general scheme of things, mustn’t they? And they have such detail, don’t they?

I remember this dream with almost complete clarity, right from early in Stuart’s life, when he was a toddler, right up to that moment in the toilet; forty-three years that passed in a flash. Time that culminated in the materialisation of the very premonition that had haunted him for years… in all those toilets. And why, do you suppose, is it that we involve our loved ones in these dreams?

Perhaps, one day, we will understand these things. In the meantime, I’ll carry on waiting for Maria and Jessica to wake up. They’ll be awake in a minute or two. I’m sure you will like them.


© Allen Ansell 2023