Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

Can I choose my dreams, so that I do not dream of the unattainable, so that I become a different person who dreams that he can tell the difference between a live man who thinks he is dead and a dead man who thinks he is alive? I am alive, and when I'm not dreaming I say: 'I didn't dream, and it did me no harm.'

Waking up is when the real arises from the imaginary in a revised version, when poetry returns safely from the heavenly realms of elevated language to an earth that doesn't resemble its poetic image.

I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment. For dreaming is not seeing the unseen, in the form of an object of desire, but not knowing you are dreaming. However, you have to know how to wake up.

Noticing how many of my dreams are lost, I stop myself demanding too much water from the mirage. I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning.

It's an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There's only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.

And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there's no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don't know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words.

You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: 'It's fallen into the trap.' And you snap the book shut: 'I've killed it ... I've killed it!'

You think you've convinced it and switch off the light and go to sleep. But having sucked most of your blood it starts humming again, threatening a new attack. And forces you into a subsidiary battle with your perspiration.

You try to kill it with one of your shoes, but it dodges you and escapes and reappears with an air of malicious satisfaction. You curse it loudly but it pays no heed. You negotiate a truce with it in a friendly voice: 'Sleep so that I can sleep!'

It only visits in darkness like al-Mutanabbi's fever. It buzzes and hums like a warplane which you don't hear until it has hit its target: your blood. You switch on the light to see it and it disappears into some secret corner of the room, then settles on the wall - safe, peaceful, as if it has surrendered.