Mr. Morpheus: The man of my dreams

I know what you’re bound to say when I tell you. You’ll probably smile sympathetically and say, “Well, Robert, everyone has peculiar dreams. They’re dreams after all”. And then you’ll probably describe to me some weird, outlandish dream you had where you were being ingested by a large fish or followed down the street by a man-sized, laughing tomato. Well, strange as those dreams are, believe me, they are nothing compared to the weirdness of my subconcious. You see, my dreams actually happen for real, someplace else, while I’m dreaming them and, not only that, I know they happen because I read about them in the morning papers. When I go to sleep, that’s when my dream self Mr. Morpheus wakes up and goes flying about like Wonder Witch on a night time spree of adventures doing all sorts of crazy, surreal but heroic things. I want you to understand that I haven’t always had dreams that came to life like that. I used to have a pretty normal sort of imagination that stayed within the confines of my head the way everyone else’s does but then; I think because I felt kind of bored with the routine of my life, my job at a factory making squeaky rubber ducks for bath time fun and chew toys for dogs, I decided to volunteer for some clinical trials they were doing at my local hospital on a drug called Somnelol; a drug for curing sleep disorders like Sleep apnoea. Basically, the men in white labcoats just injected me with a hundred CC’s of this Somnelol and then I went to sleep and dreamed for an hour while they monitored my brain waves or my brain patterns or something on this EEG machine. It was good money, I have to admit, just for lying about and dreaming but then again, no one told me that I would end up having these weird; these weird, what you might call ‘Out of body experiences’. Anyway, about the fifth night that I got back from the hospital, I started having these terrible migraine headaches; like an axe head had been driven deep into the back of my cranium and so I took a couple of pain killers and, when that didn’t work, a couple of sleeping pills that knocked me right out. That’s when I had my first experience of being Mr. Morpheus. I dreamt I was flying high over the city and, just like in a dream, I couldn’t really see myself. Infact it almost felt as if, like a ghost, I had no body and I had absolutely no control over what I was doing. Nonetheless, people could certainly see me because, looking down at the streets below, I could see lots of tiny, really astonished people who were looking up and pointing in my direction. The funny thing is, I remember, it didn’t seem at all strange to me to be flying over the city without the aid of an aeroplane or a hot air balloon. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And then, suddenly, I was in a completely different place; hovering above a tall building that was on fire and, looking down, I saw two people leaning out of a window on the top floor, coughing and choking on smoke and fumes and seeming in total despair as the firemen on the ground had given up all hope of rescuing them. Then, immediately, I got this strange sense that, like, if I don’t help these people then the whole tower block is just going to collapse beneath them and they’re going to be killed. And then the craziest thing of all happened. All of a sudden, the entire roof of the tower block seemed to be made of brown paper and, reaching down instinctively with arms that seemed to be made of some intangible substance like a light mist, I just tore the whole thing away, just as if I were opening a parcel. Ofcourse, the screaming people on the top floor now looked up at me, totally stunned and a little afraid, with gawping expressions; a young woman in her 20’s or 30’s and a boy of about 8 or 9. But then, another really bizarre thing happens, because then, suddenly, I have this enormous silver shovel in my hands and I just scoop them both right up into this shovel and I carry them safely down to the ground where all the firemen and police and ambulance people are also looking pretty amazed. “I must be dreaming”, said the Fire chief staring at me with bulging eyes, “I don’t believe what I’m seeing”. Then, I think, someone must have asked me who or what I was because the next thing I knew, I had turned into an enormous flickering, green neon sign that read ‘Mr. Morpheus’. And then, that’s when I woke up and, I remember, my headache was completely gone but my head was now totally spinning in circles with confusion. I kept on asking myself, you know, as you do, “What the hell was all that about?”. But then, the next day, I got up and I read the morning edition of the Metropolitan Times and there was a big front page news report about this bizarre, mysterious flying man in golden ski goggles and a dark blue, star spangled scuba suit who saved a 28 year old woman and her 8 year old son from a burning tower block by scooping them up with an enormous shovel ; a man who had identified himself as Mr Morpheus, a friendly visitor from the dimension of dreams. At first I thought, you know, “God, I must be still dreaming” but then a whole day went past and the newspaper article was still there and, not only that, but it was all over the TV news as well, on almost every channel; people asking the same question, “Who is this mysterious Mr. Morpheus?”. And that was only the first time it happened. The same weird thing has happened to me now at least a few hundred times; me falling asleep and then my dream alter ego flying off and rescuing somebody from some terrible calamity. “That’s very interesting”, said the enormous talking, green Koala bear in an Austrian accent, “What do you think it could mean? Perhaps this Mr Morpheus fellow represents the hero that you feel could be hidden deep within you”. “You think?”, said Robert. But then, suddenly, he was tearing off his own face like it was made of thin latex and, underneath of Robert Rosenblum’s nose and eyes and mouth was that face he had seen so many times in the paper; the golden goggled face of Mr. Morpheus, smiling and happy at last to meet him.