‘My God! That’s like having to sit through a trial,’ I joked. He said he didn’t care, trial or no trial, but he had to put a stop to it. ‘Why all these tricks? I’ve never done anyone any harm.’
‘Sure, not until you started seeing yourself in other people’s dreams,’ I said.
Hossam is right to object. Usually he’s extremely polite. For him, politeness is a choice, a defence, like the shell of a snail. It’s the most effective way to avoid people and keep your interactions superficial. ‘Then you can peel yourself away from them whenever you want, without them feeling any pain’ – that’s his philosophy.
Hossam lived in a small room, by himself. He shared the shower with neighbours. The shower was outside his room. He only took a shower after checking that everyone else had had a shower before him. Sometime he waited till late at night. And he had only one friend, which was me. And I loved his politeness.
In one of the dreams, he found himself in a romantic relationship with a girl. I don’t know if his politeness had anything to do with it. ‘We started the relationship quickly. Faster than you can imagine. Within minutes we were lovers. I ended up kissing her in her car. On the motorway. She was the one driving. But an old man came up alongside us and started cursing and making obscene gestures with his hands. Then he gave up and overtook us. A few minutes later we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam, and we started kissing like crazy and the other drivers were looking at us. We took no notice. I even squeezed her left breast. But the dirty old man reappeared, parked close to a traffic policeman. He had reported us, and we were wanted for offending public morals. As soon as we approached, he pointed at us and started cursing. The policeman stopped us and started preaching a sermon, more like a priest than a policeman. I bowed my head in embarrassment and the girl started crying.’ The next morning, when Hossam woke up, he still felt guilty. He got dressed and headed straight to a flower shop. He bought a bunch of flowers and started to draft a message apologizing to the girl, whom he saw every day. She lived near the travel agency where he worked. The thing about her that had caught his attention was the fact that she wore white rubber boots.
The flowers he was carrying were also white. ‘She must love white,’ he said. She might even stick one of them in her boot.
Hossam went up to the girl, said, ‘I apologize,’ and offered her the flowers. The girl was surprised, or maybe she pretended to be surprised. When she asked him why he was apologizing, he said, ‘Didn’t you dream about me last night?’
‘Sorry? Why would I dream about you? Do I even know you?’
‘No, but you dreamed about me,’ he replied.
Then Hossam started to get agitated and more aggressive. Passers-by gathered around him. It was like a scene from Candid Camera. People were smiling and looking at the buildings to find the hidden camera. ‘This girl dreamed about me last night,’ said Hossam. ‘I’m sure of it. Ask her. It was just a few hours ago and now she’s trying to pretend I’m nothing to do with her. What nonsense!’ But the girl wasn’t lying. She really didn’t recognize him.
‘Liar! Liar!’ Hossam started shouting. Then he threw the flowers on the ground and trampled on them. ‘I hope your flowers burn in hell,’ he said.
He ended up in the police station and almost lost his job.
I fully agree that Hossam wasn’t responsible for his problems.
Sometimes he dreamed that he was a pressing human need. I remember him telling me how he saw himself in a dream as a pair of glasses hanging on the branch of a tree. The glasses belonged to a little boy who was crying beneath the tree. The little boy was the main character, since he was sitting in the dream director’s chair. But he didn’t do anything. The boy was lazy. Very lazy, in fact, because the branch wasn’t that high. ‘What was he waiting for? For an earthquake to happen and the glasses to fall and save the situation?’
Hossam’s absolutely worst dream was when he saw himself as a piece of dog shit on the pavement. He couldn’t do anything about it. ‘I couldn’t jump off somewhere or even crawl. I was firmly stuck to the ground. And I was sweating. I must have been a fresh piece of shit, a piece of shit that had just come out. But from where I was, I couldn’t see a dog nearby. I thought I would never get out of this dream and would spend the rest of my life as a piece of shit on the pavement. A few minutes later war broke out, and it was a vicious war, with RPGs and machine guns. There was an invasion, with armed men taking up their positions.’
While he was looking for the dream director, who wasn’t visible anywhere, Hossam saw an army boot, which landed on him and lifted him up off the pavement. ‘Hey, man, imagine you’re the piece of shit that’s stuck to the boot of a gunman during what appears to be an attack. While his comrades move forward according to the plan, the gunman stops and tries to get you off his boot because the smell’s interfering with his concentration. He rubs you against the pavement and starts cursing the guts that produced you. Moments later he realizes that he’s a target. No one’s covering him and his comrades have moved ahead, either because the smell is so strong or for strategic reasons determined by how long the attack is expected to last. Then he starts shooting to protect himself. He’s scraping his boot to get the shit off and firing his rifle at the same time. At random, of course. Except he took a bullet or two in his leg, and then in his hip. Blood flowed, soaked his combat trousers, ran down into his boot and then touched me. Because of the blood, I fell off the boot, but I was still wet with that gunman’s blood.’
Not all his dreams were frightening. Once he saw himself as a kiss. Hossam wasn’t the lips that shared the kiss. ‘I was the kiss itself. I don’t know how to explain that. I was just a feeling in the dream.’
The people who took on the role of film director in his dreams might be Hossam’s neighbours, or sometimes members of his family. Even his former wife. I had spoken to some of them at the police station or the hospital. They assured me that, to their surprise, what Hossam said about their dreams was one hundred per cent true. Some people were going to file a complaint against Hossam in court – they didn’t want Hossam holding them responsible for their dreams.
All Hossam could do was wait for the main character in his dream to wake up and open their eyes. At that point Hossam would wake up too, shaking off the blanket irritably and cursing the person in whose dream he’d found himself. He would put on his dressing gown and his sandals and, straight out of bed, without washing or even combing his hair, he’d head over to his neighbour’s. He’d knock on the door. The neighbour was caught off guard when Hossam jumped in with his question: ‘Can you tell me what you dreamed about last night?’
Hossam wasn’t on close terms with any of his neighbours. His relationship with them was distant. So it was odd for him to ask them directly about their dream when he had never had a proper conversation with them. They wouldn’t talk about their dream, so Hossam told them his version. They were surprised. Hossam took advantage of their surprise to lay into them with his fists, shouting, ‘This is a violation of privacy. This is a violation of privacy.’ Sometimes he would take the day off work and go by bus to settle a score with some dreamer.
He tried all kinds of ways to avoid other people’s dreams, but none of them worked. In the end he joined a shooting club, in the hope that he might transfer his new skills to other people’s dreams and kill them by mistake. ‘Mistakes do happen, even in dreams, don’t they?’ he said.
Although he didn’t yet have a gun licence, he managed to buy a Colt revolver and he carried it around with him wherever he went, to the supermarket or to work. Even when he went to bed, he stuffed it behind his back in the hope that it would go into his dream with him. ‘Do you sleep with the revolver on your hip?’ I asked him. When he said yes, I was dismayed. I was worried he might use it against one of the people he dreamed about.