Oleksandr Dan - Insomvita

“So, that’s it for today?” he asked, confused.

“Yes. I say we meet tomorrow at the same time and have another session. I recommend you rest today. Set aside all your business and thoughts. Just relax emotionally and psychologically. Go to a night club. That might work. Try not to think about what happened. Okay?”

“Relaxing is all I’ve been doing lately,” Trevor grumbled.

Robert opened his eyes. He woke up as suddenly as he had fallen asleep. It seemed as though the bed simply spit him out from somewhere inside the thick mattress. He was still very confused, as if he had been startled awake from a nightmare, and tried to concentrate. His heart was racing and his brain felt as though it was about to explode.

Robert was not simply confused; he was surprised, shocked, stunned, because he just went from being a passive bystander to an active participant in his dream. That was something he had not expected.

It was clear that Amanda could hear him and answer his questions. This was the first time in Robert’s life that he had had direct conscious contact and even a dialog with the world of his dream. Robert had often thought about this, but when it finally happened, he was not ready and did not know where to start. He decided that it was his only chance to find the truth and wanted to remain in that state for as long as he could.

He needed answers, but for that he had to convince Amanda that his existence here, in this world, separately from Trevor, was real. She had asked him to speak about himself, and Robert excitedly shared the story of his life on this side of the dream with her.

But then everything disappeared just as fast as it had appeared, leaving Robert alone with his thoughts and doubts.

What had happened to him further complicated Robert’s already difficult situation, plunging him greater into uncertainty and hardly helping him to find the thread that could lead him to unravel his psychological state.

Robert slowly got up, took out a red-bound diary from his suitcase, sat down at the table and began writing in detail everything that happened to him in the dream. As he was finishing, he wrote “PSYCHIATRIST. URGENTLY!!!” in big letters at the bottom of the page and underlined the words three times.

Just three hours remained before his flight and Robert hurriedly left the hotel room. He decided he would find a psychiatrist as soon as he returned to Prague to conduct the experiment proposed by Amanda. This had to be done as soon as possible.

Trevor, conflicted with emotion, left Amanda’s office and headed towards his hotel, thinking about what just happened. He was deeply confused about what the psychologist had told him.

There was another person living inside him!

I have a split personality, he thought. I’m demented. I guess I’m demented! I am a mentally ill person and I will probably have to get some sort of treatment.

Trevor tried to think about what he knew about mental illnesses. Shots of some black and white films came to mind: insane people in straitjackets with wide straps buckled behind their backs, bloodshot eyes, crazy looks, desperate screams, wild laughter, convulsions, and shock therapy.

Trevor’s knowledge in this field was extremely poor, but it was enough to provoke panic. He trembled as he walked along the street.

Amanda watched him from behind a slightly opened curtain with concern. The phone started ringing. She picked up and after a brief pause answered: “Yes, I found out, but it’s not so simple… Something's changed, and I will need a little more time. I’d like to reschedule everything for tomorrow.” She listened to a man’s voice and quietly replied, “Yes, this is very important… to me.”

Trevor crossed the street and, having forgotten about his meeting with Jovan, continued to walk uncertainly along the paved road.

Amanda’s words were throbbing in his head: “Shamans, African sorcerers.”

He recalled driving with a BBC crew and Etienne on a bumpy dirt road in the jungles of Sierra Leone at the end of the 1990s.

In a village, sixty miles northeast of Freetown, where they stopped for the night, the reporters stumbled upon some festival of the local Yoruba [21] Yoruba (Ọmọ Yorùbá) is an ethnic group that inhabits West Africa (from the mouth of the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea): Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana. There is also a small diaspora in Canada. The Yoruba constitute nearly 40 million people. people.

The locals treated the foreigners with cameras surprisingly peacefully, allowed them to spend the night and even invited them to participate in the festivities under the condition that all cameras remained in the car.

In the evening, the whole village gathered near the round reed hut of the chief.

Trevor was treated to some local drink made of the fruits of a marula [22] Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) is a deciduous tree of the sumac family. The tree has a wide crown and grey mottled bark and grows up to 18 m. It is indigenous to the woodlands of South and West Africa. that had a very unpleasant sour taste and affected the brain like a “blow from a mule’s hoof”, as the locals joked. Sometime later, when Trevor began to recover, he realized that he almost could not feel his body and only his brain was clearly showing “signs of life”. In addition, as it turned out later, the drink accelerated perception of his surroundings.

Everyone was dancing to the beat of a sad song and rhythm of special, ritual drums carved from a tree trunk called a Bata. Later, the intensity of the drums increased so much that the movements of the dancers resembled convulsions. The volume of the chanting would sometimes muffle even the sounds of the Bata.

One of the men set fire to a wide ring on the ground, evoking ominous shadows and reflections. The drums died down and everybody stopped to watch the circle of fire.

An enchanter with a long staff, to which a dozen small white monkey skulls were attached, knocking loudly against each other in time with his movements, entered the circle through a narrow passage.

The drums resumed their beat and the men and women began to dance synchronously.

Not feeling his body, Trevor moved to the rhythm of the drums together with the rest.

The enchanter was dressed in bright sheet that loosely fit his body.

As thin as a skeleton, he bent over and began to spin inside the circle of fire. His face grew calm in the flashes of fire but it soon transformed into menacing grimaces. He gritted his thin, uneven, yellow teeth and shouted something in an unfamiliar language.

Then suddenly he fell silent, stood up and raised his hand to the sky. Several small grey bones flew from his palm before scattering around him inside the circle of fire. The enchanter leaned forward and looked intently at the bones. Then he straightened up, stretched out his arms and began to whisper some spells while staring at the sky. His eyes, covered by a white fog, looked unnerving.

The drumming grew faster, louder.

The sorcerer, with his arms still spread wide, began to rise.

When he reached a meter and a half above the ground, he dropped his staff.

The dancing became more frenetic, and the volume of the singing increased, reaching its climax. Robert was reminded of a Witches’ Sabbath.

The enchanter slowly began to descend, nodding his head sharply and staring with his blind eyes into the crowd around him, as if searching for prey. When his bare feet touched the ground, the sounds were dispersed by an abrupt silence.

The old sorcerer kept his blind eyes on Trevor. He moved his arms forward and slowly approached through the circle of fire. Trevor stood frozen, deprived of any control over his own body. The enchanter touched his forehead with his palm. At that moment, the enchanter’s body bent back unnaturally and began to shake, his hand still glued to Trevor’s forehead. His cloudy eyes were directed somewhere in the distance, where a full, inverted moon shone as a pale witness to the Devil’s Sabbath.