Dream: end of the world via Tibetan treasures

The dream starts in a large park. I am standing in the depth of the night, the sky completely dark and illuminated only by shrill manmade lights. I don't instinctively know where I am, but looking around I feel like it's perhaps Southbank in Brisbane. It is a large green space with manmade paths weaving through, and people are everywhere as if it's new years.

But it's not new years, and I realise this is a end of the world party. If everyone knew that they were going to die, wouldn't they want to come here and have fun with their friends before they die?

At first I am alone but soon I see some people I know. I can't remember who they are now, but they are sitting on picnic blankets enjoying food, and they invite me to join them. I chat with them for a while then get up and walk around again. Though there must be thousands of people in the park, I manage to find a few friends to say goodbye to.

Then I see my high school friends and they are all in one group. I wonder momentarily where their partners and other friends must be (we haven't gone back in time because they all look as they do right now). They tell me about an exhibit in a museum of the lost treasures of Tibet. I am excited by this and decide that if the world was to end, I definitely want to see this.

So we start walking there, and along the way I am telling the group stories of the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet and how he had stored some treasures in Sikkim prior to his actual going into exile. I am recounting stories of how they avoided the guards and soldiers by going over the high mountains, all the while worrying about exposure and hypothermia. As I am getting more animated, we enter a dark building where all the lights have been dimmed. We strain to see as we move forward in a narrow corridor, which barely fits two people at a time.

I look around me to see if I can recognise anything. There are shadows of display boxes in the distance, but it is so dark that I can't make out what's in them. I start to think that perhaps we have gotten to the exhibit too late and it has already been looted.

We emerge into a bright lecture theatre packed with throngs of people. I have lost my friends and can't see them anywhere. First I look for them all around, then I give up and just look for an empty spot. I finally find one in the middle of a row and squish through people to get there.

Just as I sit down the lights are dimmed. I look to my right and it's Andy, Charley, and Henry sitting in a row. Wait a minute, I think, if this is the apocalypse, they must be really good friends to be still sticking together?

The man on the lecture podium names himself as Nakashima. He is a short balding middle aged man with a slightly stooped posture. His voice is quiet and steely as he starts speaking about the end of the world. Emphatically, he tells us that we have all been inflicted with a disease that remains unnamed and unqualified. It is incorporated into our DNA and has been part of our genetic destiny since we were bonobos. No one knows what triggers it, and why we are all dying from it.

Lies! I want to shout. The Japanese are trying to take over the world and they are telling us these lies so we will give up and die. 

Then I wake up. 

Five pre-exam dreams

Dialysis during war
In this dream, we are at war. It's not clear where the war is, but it instinctively feels somewhere tropical. Everything is green and lush, and the air feels humid and sticky.

I am the commander of a unit, and we are all wearing camouflage gear. We run through the low lying bushes, intermittently meeting enemies and exchanging fire with them. It all seems like a game.

Then it is night and we are back at the army barracks. It is a simple building that looks like a warehouse with high ceilings, the dim lighting provided by several naked lightbulbs. Bunkbeds are lined up down one side, strewn with rough looking blankets.

B is there with a machine that she has propped up on her bed. I walk closer and realise it is a dialysis machine, though much smaller than ones usually in clinical use. She has a fistula on her left forearm, which she is cannulating with the buttonhole technique. She hooks herself up to the machine and it hums with a low frequency. It is the only noise among the dead quiet of the night.

Later she comes up to me and says - I think there is a problem with the dialysis machine, I don't feel well. We discuss this for a while, and I tell her that whilst ideally we should do a Kt/V to figure out her urea clearance we don't have access to those facilities.

Then it is the next day, and the two of us leave the army barracks. she is carrying her dialysis machine and I am carrying some sort of machete. We walk through the fields and I tell her to protect herself and the machine at all costs, but strangely we come across no-one.

We see a subway station and go down some steps. It is a subway station of the No. 9 subway line in Shanghai, and when we first enter it appears completely deserted. The wind travels through the underground gently, scattering small piles of dust and rubbish which have collected. We walk around looking for some sort of entrance to the tracks, wondering if a train would come. Then we realise that there are a number of ATMs around which are still on, their lights flickering intermittently. Then we see people dashing out from the darkness, standing in front of the ATMs for just a few seconds before disappearing back into the darkness.

There is an ominous feeling and my alertness is heightened. We stand next to one ATM waiting for the bank advertisements to change. Then a man comes out from the darkness and says - what are you looking for? these machines are the very last connection we have to the Internet.

Then I wake up.

Tourism in Tonga 
In this dream I am in the Tongan jungle. The foliage is dense and there is barely any light on the jungle floor. The giant tree roots are gnarled and twisted around my feet, tempting me to fall. The mud is thick and black, splattering carelessly onto my clothes. The air has an incredibly intense scent of decay and regrowth, and the whole place feels alive - as if I am inside a giant living being.

Pausing for a second, I can see all sorts of insects scattering around, and I become acutely aware of leeches sliding up my legs, crawling silently as they suck on my blood.

I am with two local men who are dressed in Steve Irwin khakis that look frankly ridiculous on their thick Melanesian frames. They are also wearing explorer hardhats which are comically lopsided on their large heads. Practically bursting out of their ill fitting uniforms, they are both drenched in sweat.

We are traversing a ravine when I slip and almost fall to the bottom. They rush to my aid and I stand up straight again, amused by how overwhelming the environment is, and struck by the feeling of utter isolation.

Thank you so much for coming, they say, clearly the footpath will be very helpful in this part of the track. I chat with them a little more and find out that we are mapping out the route for a walk that will go all the way around the island of Tonga. They tell me that the tourism industry has been failing due to all the tourists going to other pacific islands. They are hopeful that this new exotic challenging walk will bring lots of tourists in.

A walk here? I wonder, looking up at the foliage which is so dense that no trace of the sky is discernible.

Then I wake up.


My face! My face!
In this dream I am rinsing my mouth in the sink in my own bathroom at home. Small flecks of corn come out and I wonder, I must have eaten some corn and it got stuck in my teeth.

With the water running, I keep rinsing and the corn keeps coming. Suddenly they turn into small specks of meat that resemble mince. I am puzzled by this - I haven't eaten meat for months, how did this meat get into the sink?

As I keep rinsing, I wonder if something has happened to my brain and I am not able to perceive the feeling of having food remnants in my mouth - how can this much corn & meat come out and I have no idea where it's stuck?

The specks of meat start getting bigger, and soon they look like blobs of meat. They get bigger still until they look like those stirfry strips you buy at the supermarket.

Just what in the world is going on? I think. I look up at the mirror and realise with a start that my face is disintegrating and the strips of meat in the sink are my face. I try to grab the last strip, a good chunky one as it starts to gurgle down the drain.

My face! My face! I scream silently in the dream. Then I wake up.


A difficult intubation
In this dream, A and I are called urgently by a nurse to Blue ICU. We go into bed 35 and there is a man there who looks very unwell. K is at the top end holding a mask on his face, so we turn around and start getting drugs and equipment ready to intubate him.

Next thing we know, K has already started the intubation without equipment or drugs. With the laryngoscope in his mouth, the patient starts struggling like crazy, trying to punch her with both his arms. She manages to duck the punches in between looking in his mouth, and shouts out for a bougie. The man starts bucking up and down on the bed, trying to squirm away from her. The nurses hand K a coat hanger and she shoves that into his mouth. We watch silently, utterly horrified as she manages to somehow get the tube over the coathanger.

Intubated, the man stops struggling and the chaos seems to have abated. She is bagging him with zest and his colour improves. Then there is water coming out from his mouth, pouring down the side of his neck, over his chest and down onto the ground. The water is coming so fast that the puddle on the ground expands rapidly.

I start to think about the implications of this if the electronic equipment were shortcircuited - or worse, if we were all electrocuted.

What's happening? I shout to K. but she is so engrossed in the bag that she doesn't reply or look up.

My eyes follow the trail of water from the ground up and as it tracks across his body back into his mouth and the bag, I realise the bag is attached to a piece of garden hose. Following the hose away from the patient, I realise that it is attached to the cold water tap, and she is bagging him with tap water!

Then I wake up.




RPA shopping centre
This is a very brief dream where I leave the ICU and walk outside to the foyer. I am looking for a ward (6E2? I can't remember) but when I walk up the stairs RPA has turned into a shopping centre and all the wards have become hidden within shops. I give up looking for the ward and go back down to ICU which looks exactly the same.

Then someone asks me if I've organised the RMO dinner and I say I haven't even thought about it, but it should be easy since we are now in a shopping centre! I go back into the shops and start looking around for restaurants. I come across quite a few but they are all closed.

I feel annoyed and think, what sort of shopping centre is this, nowhere to eat! Then I wake up.

Dream: a few rounds of death

The dream begins in a dark warehouse. I am alone, and instantly aware that I am being pursued. Large crates are stacked all around me, and I am crouching next to some sort of bobcat. Many pieces of machinery are scatteredly haphazardly around, like someone abandoned them in a hurry.

I hear footsteps approaching and silently begin to move. I have no idea where I'm moving to but my feet seem to be taking me away from the footsteps. I stop and wait again. Now there are two sets of footsteps and they are converging upon me. It is so dark that my sense of hearing is heightened.

As they come within a few metres of me I turn around and see that there is a set of shutter doors which swing open like in those old Western movie saloons. I duck quickly under the doors and hide inside the small alcove which is barely larger than a cupboard. As I look out through the shutters, I realise a lightbulb is casting its light directly over the space just outside the doors. I know then that I will see my attackers just in the moment before they find me.

They come closer in silence. As I predicted, they pause in the dim pool of light just outside the shutters. I know they have found me and time seems to stop while they are drawing their guns, in ridiculously slow motion.

The one on the right looks Italian, tall with dark hair and a receding hairline, wearing a black leather jacket. The one on the left looks Southeast Asian, short and stout with a beer gut. As they raise their guns and point directly at me, I think for a moment that I am going to die. I didn't even realise my gun is loaded and in my hands, but at that moment I am acutely aware of the cold steeliness of the weapon. I raise the gun and shoot them both, first the Italian guy in the left chest and then the Asian guy in the left shoulder. The Italian guy falls to his knees and collapses silently in a pool of blood. The Asian guy remains standing, and I try to shoot him again but I have no more bullets in my gun. His weapon drops with a conspicuous clunk to the ground and he remains standing for a while, bleeding profusely, then slowly slumps to the ground.

The whole thing must have not taken more than a minute, but I feel like hours have passed. My heart is racing and my hands are covered in cold sweat. I take out my phone and ring 000. The next moment, ambulance officers have arrived and I am still standing exactly where I was. They check the Italian guy and he is dead. They check the Asian guy and they think he's dead too, but I could see that he's still breathing and rush out of the alcove to tell them he's not dead. When I get closer I see that the bullet must have clipped his shoulder and actually hit his face, and his entire left head is swollen. He has a good carotid pulse and chest rise seems equal, so I tell them to take him quickly to the hospital because he has probably had penetrating head trauma and needs urgent surgery.

Then I am on a ship. It feels like a military warship, though I don't really know why. There certainly aren't any oldies or recreational activities around, and the atmosphere is absolutely sombre. It is still in the depth of the night, and dark stormclouds twirl close to the horizon, threatening us just above our heads. I am all alone on this ship and cannot hear or see anyone.

The sea is angry and the turbulent waves rock the large ship violently. I am struggling to hold onto the railing as I try to find someone so I can find out where I am or what has happened. As I walk forward, the wind starts howling and it feels like knives are slashing my face. Up ahead I can see lights at the front of the ship, and keep struggling to move towards the lights.

It starts to rain, and the droplets seem to be vicious too, falling in my eyes and making the world blurry. As I get closer to the light, I realise there is a huge crowd of people around someone on a makeshift bed.

We must save the general! One man at the head of the bed is shouting.

I stand a few metres away and watch what is going on. There are two men in white coats at the head of the bed who seem to be the doctors, and then there are a crowd of other people at the foot of the bed milling around. I can't tell if any of them are doing anything helpful.

I get closer and realise the man on the bed is the Asian man I shot in the warehouse. His face is grotesquely distorted, and a surgeon is trying to pick outs of fractured skull. Blood has soaked through all the bedding and is dripping onto the ground. I realise with a start that he is not anaesthetised and his eyes are bulging practically out of their sockets. He has an arterial line and the monitor says his BP is 50/30.

Everyone stop! I shout and everyone stops momentarily, looking startled. What's going on? I demand.

The surgeon explains that this is the commander in chief of the army, who has been shot by enemies during a rogue attack. They had done an exploratory craniotomy because his head was so swollen they thought they had to decompress it for intracranial hypertension, but never actually found the bullet. They lost the anaesthetist during the war and thought he was so hypotensive he probably wouldn't remember the surgery anyway.

As he is explaining this the BP starts to slide, and I ask one of the nurses to fetch more blood. She comes back with a bag containing 2 units of packed cells and 2 units of FFP and says that this is all there is left of the blood bank. We give it to him, but the BP remains terrible. As the wind howls I think - this man has actually not died from my bullet but from poor medical management?

The surgeon keeps prying at the swollen brain tissue, trying to escape from the small hole like a mushroom. The monitor makes ominous lower and lower pitch sounds as the BP falls to near zero. 

Then I wake up

Dream: Shinazu kintawa

This was a very strange dream indeed and some parts are missing.

I am in a department store - difficult to tell where I am exactly as department stores all around the world are bright, clean and nice smelling. I am wandering around in the cosmetics section and thinking about why I'm there. There are several TV screens around advertising various things. I spy an ad for a perfume which hangs on my mind.

Then I am in a huge crowd of people going towards somewhere, the crush feels like Japan. It seems to be the office rush - everyone is in suits carrying briefcases and umbrellas. I'm carried along with the wave until I realise that I am very close to my own apartment building.

There is a sense of foreboding as I approach my building, the crowd still shuffling around me. I realise that a man in a well-cut suit in front of me is carrying a carry-bag from the department store where I was just now. He takes an expensive looking bottle of perfume out of the bag and looks at it. I am standing next to the mailboxes and watching him intently.

Suddenly a policeman comes up next to me and says quietly, we have to hurry, there isn't much time left. I look at him and realise that I am some sort of undercover police person.

The man with the perfume opens the door to my building and I suddenly realise shinazu kintawa is the name of the perfume I saw advertised in the store - and he is going to use it to poison the world by releasing it into the ventilation system of my building. The policeman tells me that the entire world will enter a coma and there will be no going back from this mass destruction.

Who thought there could be a perfume of mass destruction? I think.

We run into the stairwell and all goes black.

The next scene, I am sitting on a plane. I feel relieved that the world has not been terminated, then a sense of dread asI realise that the policeman is no longer with me. Instead I'm with my friends C & S who are chattering away as if nothing has happened (of course.. they don't realise anything has happened).

My heart is heavy as we land, and I'm wondering where the policeman is. We are supposed to be in Bali, but the men who come to move our luggage are heavyset Melanesians and I wonder if we have gone to the wrong country. We look around for our bags and mine is missing - a red duffle bag that I don't have in real life.

Finally all the other bags are collected and there is a single red duffle left which resembles my bag. The airport staff tell us that someone must have picked up my bag by mistake, so I look at the tag to find out who that might be, and it says CW - my boss' name! We find out from immigration that he entered the country saying he will be staying at the Intercontinental.

So we set off along the road which hugs the seashore to go to the Intercontinental. As I look around I say to C&S - this is definitely not Bali! There are hardly any people around, and Denpasar airport is not right next to the sea. The roads in Bali are not nearly so potholed, and none of these people look remotely Indonesian.

They pay no attention to me and keep chattering. In the distance we see some large buildings and go towards them. Then my friend S is tired and has sore feet, and starts complaining.. are we there yet? are we there yet?

Then I wake up.

Post Script - Google translate says shinazu kintawa = it was gold not die.

Daytrip to Noumea

One morning during the ward round, my boss showed me an email written in strange English about a patient in Noumea with severe ARDS. Asked what my thoughts were, I answered I think she needs ECMO! and was told that that was indeed the plan. I asked if I could tag along, not really expecting that it would really happen – after all I am supposed to be at work looking after patients! But the next thing I knew, the head honcho of cardiac anaesthesia had organised a seat for me on the retrieval plane.

So on this sunny afternoon, we stood outside RPA waiting for a taxi with our dark green ECMO bags (2 large duffles and 2 square bags, one of which contained the precious Maquet Cardiohelp machine). The whole setup was surprisingly compact and light, and as the surgeon would later remark, we can put someone on ECMO in the supermarket!

We went the backway through the taxi driver hangouts of Alexandria to the private part of Sydney airport, adjacent to the domestic terminal. Our terminal was a fancy building with hippy paintings, plush leather couches, fancy coffee machine and plentiful glossy magazines. Aesop handwash in the bathroom – what planet am I on? I thought. As we waited for everyone to arrive, domestic jets landed on the tarmac right in front of our noses. 

We boarded our Learjet 55, which was a vast improvement on the smaller Learjet 36 that we used to fly around NT in. The aircraft was relatively spacious and well set up with the removal of 2 seats to accommodate the stretcher. The cardiac anaesthetist, surgeon and I occupied the back pod of 4 seats along with our giant oxygen bottle. The temperature was regulated (no more teeth chattering at altitude) and the stability of the aircraft during takeoff and landing was excellent. There was even a little pulldown service area where one could have a hot drink and some snacks from the mini oven! It was pretty damn luxurious compared to my previous experiences with small planes in Darwin.

The others slept but I was too excited to sleep, and ended up chatting with the co-pilot and the Careflight nurse most of the way. We watched the sun set, gliding through the thick cloud layer, scattering orange rays everywhere. 

As the light faded, we descended through myriad layers of cloud moving in different directions, finally landing in Noumea to light sprinkling rain. 

The police met us on the tarmac and we filled out forms by the dim light of the ambulance that had come to fetch us. It was the first time I was stamped both in and out of the country at the same time! They obviously weren’t worried about us overstaying.

The ambulance was positively ancient, the back piled with equipment that did not fill us with confidence. The cervical collars looked like they’d been reused hundreds of times, dirty packets of gauze and grubby looking bottles of fluids lined the shelves. From where we sat on a ricketty bench we could hardly see outside as we drove the 40 minutes from the airport to Gaston Bourret hospital.

I saw a Bingo! Parlour sign as we pulled into the hospital street and wondered if that was a popular form of entertainment in New Caledonia. Then we were there, stumbling out onto the footpath at the front entrance. We loaded our bags onto a discarded hospital bed which didn’t have any functioning steering, brakes or sides. A petite woman managed to help us wheel this into ICU Service de Reanimation which I thought was such an apt name for ICU.

The ICU was brightly lit, sparkling clean and full of modern equipment – it would put many Australian hospitals to shame. The nurses and doctors were dressed in white scrubs and this did indeed make them stand out as the health care professionals – I really liked it!

We visited the patient along with the French intensivist on duty. We looked at the ventilator, infusions, blood tests and X-rays just as we would do at home, then a few phone calls were made and we decided to hold off putting the patient on ECMO for the time being. The pilots have specific rules about how long they can work before they need to have a mandatory rest, so by our calculations we could have two hours to observe the patient and make sure our decision was correct. 

What else to do but dinner? The French intensivist generously offered his car, which we promptly drove onto the wrong side of the road. Just as well there was hardly anyone out on a weeknight at 8pm, and everything seemed to be shut including the supermarket! We went to a waterfront restaurant, ate some super fresh fish, drank Perrier, and chatted about how this would be the most expensive dinner any of us would ever have (imagine, a private flight to New Caledonia just for dinner!)

Back at the hospital, we confirmed the patient was not deteriorating and packed our bags to leave. I was surprised that the intensivist was still on duty, and he told me they usually have no registrars! They have one at the moment, so one of the ten lucky intensivists get to be on-call with a registrar but she doesn’t do on-call by herself. Seems like a pretty tough life, but I guess it’s only 5 nights a month and the patients are getting the best standard of care. Just walking past the rooms, it seemed like the disease acuity in the 10-bed Service de Reanimation was pretty high – almost everyone was ventilated, and about half on dialysis. It’s apparently so busy that their 12-bed HDU mostly serves as a second ICU. 

On the way back to the airport, I sat in the front of the ambulance with the solid Melanesian ambo who looked like he could defeat anyone by sitting on them. The freeway was straight and featureless, I felt deplete of adrenaline and quite drowsy. I slept for some of the three hour flight back, waking up occasionally to see a perfect semi-lunar moon shining brightly above our heads like a street lamp. The field of stars was  simply incredible as we were flying above the cloud layer. We were so close to them that it was like we could reach out and touch them, yet they stretched so far beyond our fields of vision that they were infinite.

It was freezing in Sydney when we landed, and the customs officers looked as exhausted as we were. We lugged the gear back to the perfusion office, and I crawled into bed at 3am finally. And that was that, the end of our Noumean adventure. I had thought excitedly on the way to Noumea – in the years to come I will always remember this, my first retrieval mission. Even though we didn’t bring back the patient, I think I still will remember this day as when my love for retrieval was re-ignited. Now I’m certain I have to do some real retrievals!

Food: April & May

An impromptu lunch from a healthy eating stall at Eveleigh markets - roast vegetable tart, broccoli & feta quiche, and a yummy gluten-free banana bread. You know you are in Sydney when everything is delicious, tiny and pricey!

 

Salad Banh Mi from Marrickville Pork Roll. Not as good as a "real" pork roll, but pretty damn good. Especially love that pickled daikon, coriander and chilli.

An excellent breakfast at Element 6 in West Ryde. Baked eggs with chickpea and haloumi, topped by coriander relish and sprinkled with zaatar. The pillowy pita bread was just perfect to scoop up this spicy concoction, and I absolutely adored the double coriander flavour of roast coriander seeds used in the stew and the vibrant coriander relish on top.

Vegetarian eggs benedict from Thyme Square in Hornsby. This was pretty tasty - roast eggplant, zuccini and sweet potato atop good toast, a couple of well poached eggs and a solid hollandaise. Shame service was terrible though.

 Behold the new equivalent of the original cheeseburger that S and I used to eat all the time at Cafe Giulia. This is an amazing toasted bagel with avocado, tomato and haloumi. Really hits the spot along with one of their awesome juices.

Isn't this pretty as a picture? This is called "the most amazing vegan salad" at In the Annex which was pretty damn amazing. Chickpeas sit atop a bed of garlic hummus, topped by slivers of baby carrots and radish. The whole thing is bound together by a very mild chilli dressing and sprinkles of zaatar. Home made bread made the perfect scoop for this. If all food was this amazing, end.

Fleetwood Macchiato in Erskineville is one busy place, we waited over an hour for a table! These perfectly poached eggs were served with a softly-softly pickled eggplant, slivers of celery & fennel and topped with roasted almonds. Sounds like a strange combination, but the combined flavours were heavenly. The bread by the Bread & Butter project was also incredible, I could just eat that alone.

Now, it's hard for me to have a food post without some ramen. It's hard to eat ramen as a vegetarian - this beautiful one is from Gumshara but after picking out all the pork and dunking half a bowl of chilli pickled veg in it, I did feel like I was eating pickle ramen. 

Enter the solution. Rising Sun workshop in Newtown is a ramen popup bar which repairs motorcycles, and serves ramen too. They have three simple options - the Dark (pork), the Light (chicken? fish? can't remember) and the Monk (vegetarian). The vegetarian broth is amazing, and the first time I tried it I had to ask if it really was vegetarian. Apparently they have been throwing kilos of shiitake mushrooms in there, along with whole roasted bulbs of garlic and onion. The condiments are quite traditional - seaweed, bamboo, shallots. Each bowl is served with a slab of miso-roasted eggplant and half an egg (I was there with 2 non-egg eaters so I got all their eggs!).

 

This place is utterly amazing for vegetarians. 

A lake in Addis, and a plane crash

A beautiful lake in Addis 
(I looked on Google maps, and there is no such lake..)

In this dream, Papaya is working for a NGO in Ethiopia and has moved to Addis. She's renting a house with 3 other NGO workers who all seem young and funky, of the hippie idealistic type. We are all sitting around in the living room chatting and smoking, the dark space filled with the earthy smell of smoke. Her housemates suggest that we go to a lake near Addis, which they rave wonders about. They are amazed that neither of us have visited, and say that it is the most amazing sight in all of Ethiopia.

The next day we set out to bike to the lake. Perhaps true to the fact that I can't ride a bike in real life, I get stuck about halfway to the lake and my legs won't move anymore. We are on the side of a relatively empty highway, so we ditch my bike and I hitch a ride on the back of Papaya's bike.

When we arrive at the lake it is an utterly majestic sight. The water is a royal blue, so clear that one can see the bottom and all the little fish swimming in the lake. It stretches as far as the eye can see, resembling an inland sea. There is hardly any vegetation around the lake, and the water is so still the surface shimmers like a diamond. We dip our toes in and the water is cold - I realise that the weather is quite cold at this moment in time. We sit down on the rocks by the lakeshore and have a picnic. I am struck by how there are no other people at the lake, locals or tourists.

When we decide to go back to Addis, Papaya suggests that we take the "back way" which she says will be faster. First we ride through desert-like landscape, dry and arid, dotted with little shrubs. Then we get to a farming area where we plough through the narrow paths that farmers have made in between fields. Finally we encounter a really muddy stretch where the dust road has been flooded time and again. In this part, trucks suddenly appear out of nowhere and splatter us with mud as we ride past.

We get back to Addis and it's 4:30pm. Dirty and weary, we drag ourselves into Papaya's house and collapse on the couch. Neither of us can get up except to fetch some Diet Coke. As we sip it (so refreshing after a long tiring ride!), Papaya suddenly says, you know this is why there is so much cancer in the world.

What do you mean? I ask, puzzled by her random comment.
Diet coke is the reason for all the cancer in the world. She says, looking rather solemn. I'm so glad you've come to help me spread the message all around Ethiopia, we will start tomorrow.

Awww.. I think in my head. I thought I was here for a holiday!

Then I woke up.


A plane crash
In this dream I am living in an apartment on the 9th floor with my dad and grandma. Outside there are many other apartment buildings, and the landscape is unidentifiable. We are sitting in the living room which faces out of a very large glass window.

I am looking through the window when I suddenly notice that there is a plane approaching the area very rapidly. It is flying so low down that I can read Air France on its side. Lurching wildly, it appears to be dropping altitude quickly then cruising for a few seconds, then dropping again. I am gripped by a nauseous sense of fear in the pit of my stomach, and I stand up to get a closer look.

As I approach the window I see the plane come closer and closer to our building. Then it disappears from view and I realise it has just skimmed the top of our building. I turn around to see if I can see it from a different window, then I hear a huge explosion which is loud beyond description.

The world turns white. All noise disappears momentarily.

Then there is a high pitched buzzing sound in my ears, which I instinctively know is a leftover effect from the massive noise of the crash. The air seems to be vibrating and it's almost as if I can touch the soundwaves. I am crouched on the ground along with my family, and I have a little laugh at myself as if to say - how does crouching on the ground help if a plane crashes into our building?

The buzz subsides slowly and I help my grandma to her feet. Nothing is damaged in our apartment and we all sit down in our chairs again. I notice that there's an obs machine in the living room and I decide to do my own observations. When I put the Sats probe on, my heart rate reads 150 and there's no oxygen saturation. I put the blood pressure cuff on and I can't get it to read the first 3 times, even though it inflates so much my arm starts to go numb.

I must be really stressed from this. I think to myself. But that's funny, I don't feel stressed.

The BP finally reads 190/  and the diastolic remains empty. I stand up and look out the window again. There is a huge crater where the building opposite ours was, and I strain to see if there are any parts of the plane I can see.

Then I wake up