The star dreamer

‘Wake up, boy! Wake up…’ My father was shaking me and I was confused because it seemed that I had only just gone to sleep.

‘Get dressed. Hurry.’

The lamps were not lit and the house was silent.

Outside, the night sky glittered with stars and silken moonlight shone across the sand.

My father was the baker in our village not far from the city, and we could see the lights of braziers and torches and the oil lamplight, that seemed to run up and down inside itself, like water. We heard the bells and the blowing of the ram’s horn, the shouts of men as they shooed their animals through the narrow streets and called their wares in the market place.

I had gone there, slung on my father’s back until I was old enough to ride the ass and later to walk proudly about. At five I was given a small basket of bread rolls to carry on my head and then I did not just walk, I strutted. On this momentous night, I was ten years old and what would be asked and expected of me should not have been asked of any child.

I had long dreamed my dreams, but not every night, and for the rest I slept soundly, woke and in between there was nothing. But sometimes I had the vivid and strange dreams and I told them to my father. They interested him so much he began to ask me every morning. ‘Did you dream last night, Aziz?’ If I had, he would memorise my words.

I dreamed in letters, numbers, symbols, which I saw written in the sand and sometimes of monstrous animals, a donkey with a sheep’s body, a camel with leathern wings. The background was always dark, set about with stars and planets. Comets would shoot across, trailing sparks, and the moon was huge and red, and in one dream, it turned to water.