thai food and bad dreams

On Wednesday I went to an exhibition opening, the work of an artist called Laith McGregor. He does these amazing huge pieces, using biro on paper. Faces with big beards, the beards becoming worlds of their very own, growing in their own right, with things coming out of them, geometrics shapes and trees and things to sit on. Really cool. My friend B took me, and I took my cousin too, so we all sort of stood around looking at this stuff and feeling a little bit uncomfortable. I said to my cousin "It's all very Melbourne, isn't it?" and we kinda giggled. Lots of black, lots of red wine, lots of chatting. It's great and lovely, but just kind of hilarious to observe as an activity, with all these people participating in it as if it were the dodgem cars at the Show, wandering around and laughing and watching this art. I felt like I spent the whole night observing and critiquing other people, but I think I tend to do that all the time anyway. Looking at what they were wearing, how cute they were, how cute the people they were with were, what kind of beer they were drinking... the list goes on and on.

Anyway. After all that, the three of us went out to dinner at this little Thai place on Chapel Street, a little bit poxy but not poxy enough to make us forget we were in Chapel Street. We got a whole lotta stuff, including some very nice spring rolls and a very weird dessert, and it was lovely and tasty... and that's where the problems started. It was tasty. Too tasty. I think a little too MSG-kinda-tasty. When I got home later that night, my tummy kinda felt a bit weird, I started getting an MSG headache, my teeth were kinda grimy - all the classic Dan Has Had Too Much MSG symptoms. I went to bed and hoped for the best.

At 5am I woke up screaming and sweating from a nasty nightmare. I don't have nightmares very often, but when I do they're really scary. Like, scary to the point where I can't go back to sleep for fear the dream will continue kinda scary. I had to sit up and force my eyes open and kick my legs around just to stop myself from going back to sleep. The lights all came on, I had to change my pyjamas cos I was drenched in sweat... it was really really horrible. This probably only happens I reckon once every... 8 months? 5 months? I couldn't really say, but when it happens I really feel it, and for a few days too, a proper physical response. The dream itself doesn't sound that scary now - it never does a few days later, does it? - but at the time I thought I would die.

Basically, I was Matthew Fox from LOST (I wasn't actually him, I just looked like him for some reason). My wife's friend went missing around the same time as there was this serial killer who was leaving people's dismembered bodies around the place wrapped in brown paper (and tied up with string). So my wife for some bizarre reason was looking for one of these packages in our pool (giant, Olypmic sized pool, bigger probably) which we had at the bottom of our garden inside a giant warehouse-sized room with dim lighting. So most of the dream was her desperately wading through this pool, crying and in distress, searching for a package. She searched for days, all day and all night, and it was so intensely dark and French - the only light coming from inside the pool itself, steam rising from the water, the water crystal clear, her desperate searching made all the more painful for the fact that we as the audience knew from the clearness of the water that there quite simply was nothing in the pool at all, no bodies, no packages, nothing. And then at the last minute, she finds something. She starts screaming and I come running down to the warehouse and she calls out and says 'I've got it! It was here all along!' and I say 'No. No it wasn't. It's just been put there right now, by the killer, by the man who is now hiding in here and is about to make us his next victims.'

Oh man. I woke up right then and couldn't go back to sleep because I was sure I'd slip straight back into it and be killed. I was so sure I didn't want to go back into the dream, that place. I hated it. And so I've been wandering around for the last few days feeling absolutely insane and terrified of anything that moves. It's bad. Real bad.

The point IS that I think this was caused by the MSG in the Thai food. It's not the first time I've had distrupted sleep after eating it, and I'm convinced that it does something to the chemicals in my brain that make me go crazy. Note to self and all: do not eat late-night Thai food. Or if you do, wear a nappy to bed.