I DON'T like travelling. I am nervous about everything. I begin to have anxiety dreams from the moment I have a ticket in hand. This trip's anxiety dream took the form of a saga in which I was at the airport, and handed in my ticket, passport and visa (in the dream it wasn't clear whether this was the permission-to-enter type of visa or a Visa card) to the USSR Airlines woman at the entrance of the airport, then got distracted. That was, of course, the last I saw of my ticket, passport and visa/Visa. The rest of my travelling companions had already entered the airport building, and since this dream was set in the pre-cellphone era -- identified by the fact that the USSR was still in existence -- I could not alert them to the fact that I was no longer with them. Apparently they had failed to notice my absence, because they did not return to collect me either.
I spent the rest of the dream trying to befriend passers-by and digging up a patch of garden in front of a building that looked like a lighthouse, all in search of the ticket, passport and visa/Visa that I had so inappropriately handed to the woman at the entrance.
I don't normally have unpleasant dreams, and when I do, I can usually alter their chemical composition by forcing a happy ending before I wake up. In the case of this dream, the only happy ending I could manage was that I became friendly with the woman at the entrance, whose name, I learnt, was 'Irina' and who may have competed once in the Olympics as a gymnast. Irina assured me that the flight would not leave without me.
Even though this meant that I continued to be looking for my travel papers in the earth of a garden which may have once been landscaped by an odd seamstress woman-friend I had long ago, called Kum, I was comforted by Irina's words and was able to wake up. Of course I went right over to the filing cabinet in which I keep important papers, located my ticket and passport and stroked them lovingly, feeling glad that I wasn't flying to the Ukraine, but only New York.
Now I've got to go off and buy Aspirin and sun-block lotion and anti-anxiety pills (ha.ha.ha. I wish) -- my skin reacts to the sun in the US, because I have become allergic to the sun late in my life, and in Delhi, the pollution keeps me safe from its rays!! I know this because when I went up to the hills (where the air is clear) earlier this year, I got a rash which was identical with the rash I get when I am in the US. I'm only leaving Sunday night, so there's lots of time yet for more bulletins from the brink of my current nervous breakdown.
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