DREAMS

I experience lucid dreams quite often, this morning, it was a tragic one and I cried. It started with me falling asleep around 6AM. I am a nocturnal person, so expect my 10 – 5:50AM to be expended either writing, watching movies or reading. 

Less than an hour into the sleep, I was already dreaming. Maybe because it was in the morning, but I was conscious enough to know the date, time and place; even in my sleep I hear voices of my neighbors, my phone rang and I heard it but I could not pick the call.

 In my dream, I was an old woman; the mother of my grandmother. I cannot remember every tiny detail of the dream right now as I punch my keyboard, but I will try to put every part I remember into words before they vanish again from my head.

In the dream, I was on a faded grey aso-oke with wrinkled skin and a misty eye like someone who had cried for three decades. I sat close to the door post sifting wheat when my only child came in; a daughter I had been separated from since she was seven years old, a child whose face had been buried in the sand of time. Every day, I die slowly, plainly because I may not see my child again and there will be no one to call me “mother” before I heave my last breath.

 I was happy and sad at the same time when she walked into my courtyard. My beautiful daughter was no more the innocent girl I ‘mothered’ thirty-seven years ago. The one I saw was a bigger child, who was sick and flailing in health. On her skin lay big outgrowths like cancerous cells, even her head was not spared. These outgrowths were like big boils the size of cocoyam and they littered her skin.

They made her look sick but she was happy to see me. I held her to my bosom and cried out in pain to Ọ̀sùn Sẹngẹsẹ Òlóóyà Ìyùn for turning my daughter into a big mass of cells, dying slowly daily. 

Baba Fagbamila who stood amidst other villagers present said my daughter was chosen to be the Ọmọ Ọlúwẹrì when she was born, and as per traditions, she must become a ‘woman’ only within the premises of the shrine.

So when she was seven, before she started menstruating, before she could even get to create beautiful unforgettable memories with me, they took her away to somewhere far from where I lived. 

But of what use are my cries now when according to my daughter, the Ifa divination said that her father isn’t a pure blood, hence, the reason for the mass growing out of her skin. I held my daughter and cried again, this time my dying daughter did the consoling but I never stopped. 

I do not remember most of what I said amidst sobs but I remember saying things like “Fayinlola Abebi, tà lò sọ ẹ dì báyìí?”, “Háà! Ọ̀sùn, mì ò dè sè ó, jọ̀wọ́ mà gbà èyí lọ́wọ́ mí.”

I woke up some seconds later, the tears I cried in my dream still stuck to my face and when I ran my hands over them, they were real. I had cried in my dream but I felt it in reality. The woman I called my daughter looked very much like a younger version of my biological mother and it is quite sad that I do not remember how her voice sounded like.

“It is all a dream” I tell myself while getting ready to start a new day.

© Ololade Edun.