And when he wiped the perspiration from his forehead, neck and chest, he invariably used the same towel to dry his eyes and tear-moistened cheeks.
No matter what the hour, there would be no more sleep for Darniel, and he had become used to lying awake in bed, quietly, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sun - and the rest of the world - to rise.
But not on the morning of the sixth of May. On that morning, Daniel awoke from his dream with a clear mind and a dry, cool forehead. He was neither dizzy nor anxious, nor did his throat feel as if it had had to contend with a sandstorm during the night. Even his neck, which was usually sore - the muscles tense and knotted like an intricate piece of macramé - felt relaxed, as if he had just had a deep massage, and there was an easy mobility when, from force of habit, he reached for the glass of water.
He sat upright in bed, glass in hand, but did not drink. He felt curiously calm and refreshed. It was a little after dawn and a cool, early light filtered through the gaps in the curtains, the thin, sparse white shafts fingering the walls, the carpet and the furniture with an innocent caress.
He gazed round the bedroom as if seeing it clearly for the first time in ages. Even though nothing had changed - the wardrobes had not moved, the digital alarm clock still blinked myopically on the bedside table, and his clothes still tumbled chaotically from the chair - there was something different about the room, a sense that it had changed in some intrinsic, organic manner which he could not identify.
And then it became clear, for just a moment. Not a clear image or vision, just a sense that there was, of all things, a tree, in the room - an old, gnarled olive tree, its branches curled and twisted - growing straight out of the carpet at the foot of the bed.
Daniel peered into the space ahead. Whatever he had seen or sensed, it was no longer there. A trick of the light? Or something left over from his dream, perhaps, lingering like the faint aroma of freshly ground coffee, persisting in the air long after the beans have been ground.
Daniel breathed in deeply, and savoured the smells of the bedroom as if they were something new and exotic rather than the usual amalgam of stale air, the remnants of deodorant and sweaty socks, He was sure that, among the familiar smells he could detect a hint of mimosa and pine. Had Lisanne been using an air-freshener? It didn’t seem likely. He had, much to her relief, stopped smoking in the bedroom some months ago, so there would have been no need to perfume the room artificially.
He sniffed once or twice; it was fainter now, but still there, the merest hint of fragrance, of othemess; it was strangely intoxicating. Even more potent than the curious vision and strange smell were the unusual sounds that echoed inside his head, like the last remnants of a dream.
None of the usual noises of late-twentieth-century London intruded into the bedroom. There was no traffic, no roar of motorcycles revving up, no coughing, spluttering diesel engines, no cries of children or screams of drunks. Even his home, a late-Victorian terraced house that usually creaked and crackled with a comforting familiarity, was oddly silent, and the only sounds he could hear were the exotic timbres and fading harmonics of the final notes of a haunting melody, vaguely oriental, played on what could only be a bouzouki.
Since the nightmares had become a regular part of his life, Daniel had taken to keeping a record of his impressions and feelings in the vague, and thus far vain, hope that they might assist him in his enforced convalescence. It was not a diary - Daniel did not possess the necessary discipline to keep a diary on a regular basis - but its contents were none the less revealing.
It had been Dr Fischer’s idea, and although Daniel was at first reluctant to use it, over the months he had found a certain, if remote, solace in being able to commit to paper some of the dread of his night-time excursions into the dark.
Daniel grabbed the cheap, faint-lined, spiral-bound notebook and pen from the bedside table and, turning to a fresh page, scribbled down a few words which, he felt, most accurately represented his visual impressions, now fading swiftly: hat, sunny, blue, bouzouki, olive tree? He drew a line across the paper and underneath wrote a few remarks: sound of ocean, smell of pine needles, not a soul to be seen. He did not know what any of it meant, but as he had developed the habit of writing even his most obscure thoughts in the notebook, it seemed the right thing to do.
Besides, it made a refreshing change from the macabre and depressing thoughts and intentions that were usually committed to paper at that hour of the day.
What was the matter with him? he wondered. What exactly had he been dreaming about? Perhaps it had something to do with the sleeping tablets? For the first time in weeks he had not taken the barbiturates the doctor had prescribed. He had become fed up with their inefficacy and the sickening side effects that ensured, come what may, sleep or no sleep, he would greet the day with an abominable hangover, and now, having cut them out for just one night, instead of waking depressed and anxious, he felt relaxed and clear-headed.
Without further thought, Daniel grabbed the bottle of barbiturates off the bedside table and threw it into the waste bin beneath the window, where it landed on the heap of used paper tissues and irredeemably torn tights with a dull thud.
Wide awake now, albeit still a little baffled by the remnants of his dream, Daniel decided to get up. lt was a small, simple decision, but even so it was out of keeping with his recent behaviour, and he knew it. It was weeks since he had bothered to get out of bed before Lisanne. Even on the rare occasions when he woke to find her beside him, he usually turned over and buried his head in the pillow, preferring to fake sleep and stay in bed rather than rise to a house that had yet to show signs of life.
This morning, though, without disturbing Lisanne, he slipped out from between the sheets and put on the white towelling robe that, like a security blanket, was never far from hand. Of late he had been living in loose, casual clothing, sometimes not even progressing beyond the bathrobe. Without work his days had become unstructured and meaningless; he had sometimes not bothered to dress properly or even shave. After all, what was the point of making an effort to look presentable when he wasn’t going to leave the house?
He knew that this slovenliness upset Lisanne, but he could do nothing about it. Besides, in one way or another, everything he did these days upset Lisanne, so what difference would one extra annoyance make?
Downstairs in the kitchen Daniel filled the kettle, fished a tea-bag out of the box, located a clean mug, tossed the tea-bag in the air and caught it successfully in the mug. Then he smiled. It was a long time since he had caught himself acting so capriciously; he rather wished that Lisanne had seen him. He fetched a pint of milk from the refrigerator and set it down carefully beside the mug, then waited patiently for the water to boil.
Once again he became strangely aware of a change in his overall mood, as if a terrible curse had been lifted from him during the night and no one had told him about it. There could no longer be any doubt. It wasn’t just the sleeping tablets.
Something had happened, something important.
He reached across to the radio and switched it on. It was tuned in to a local radio station that played a non-stop selection of hits from the sixties and seventies, songs that Daniel had grown up with, songs whose words and tunes were so familiar that he barely noticed what was being played.
It was only as he was pouring the boiling water on to the tea-bag that he realised with a start he had stopped singing Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and, for several bars, had been crooning along with the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream”.
Of course, thought Daniel. It wasn’t simply a case of having dreamt something new. In fact, the contents of the new dream might even be irrelevant. What was different was that he hadn’t had the nightmare; he hadn’t spent a long, lonely night turning endless somersaults and crashing into brick walls. In its place had been... what? What exactly had he dreamt?
He tried to concentrate but realised within moments that the process of remembering the contents of a dream had nothing to do with active thinking or hard concentration, In fact, both were probably self-defeating. Dreams didn’t work like that. Daniel was not an expert, but he knew it required more abstract methods to bring dreams back from wherever it was they resided once you had woken up.
Daniel had once read a book all about how to train yourself to recall your dreams, but, typically, he could not now remember any of its contents. Save for a few of his own, slightly unconventional theories, like much of the population of the Western world Daniel saw dreams as an adjunct to life, essentially meaningless and relevant only when they played up. Like one’s appendix. At least, that was how he felt most of the time. In moments of quiet reflection, however, he was prepared to entertain other, more weighty ideas; ideas brought about, more often than not, by the contents of one of his own dreams.
For example, he had no ready explanation for what he called his ‘creative dreams’. Though these particular dreams occurred only occasionally, they were amongst the most baffling and - by extension - most interesting experiences Daniel had ever had.
In one such dream, it seemed to him that he had composed an entire movement of a classical symphony. And yet he could not read music. Not a single note. How did one explain such things? Unable to read music or to play a musical instrument, Daniel had been unable to transcribe any of the music into a form that might be recognisable, and before the day was out, the glorious melodies and harmonies he was sure he had created had disappeared. It was a wonderful, if ephemeral, taste of a world that he knew nothing of in waking life.
And then there was the scene from the “missing Shakespearean drama” that Daniel had written one night while asleep. He was no Shakespeare scholar, but there was no doubt in his mind when he woke from the dream that he had written - and watched in performance - a snatch from a hitherto undiscovered masterpiece. Though such dreams were anomalies and could, no doubt, be dismissed as hallucinatory or hysterical, for Daniel they had happened: the works had existed, albeit briefly and only in a dream.
But did that make them any less real? Were you any less terrified by a nightmare than by a “real” horrifying event?
Daniel knew, to his chagrin, that nightmares could be much more frightening than the most terrifying of real-life events. Even the accident - shocking and harrowing as it was - could not compete, in sheer terror, with the worst of his nightmares.
Daniel sat down a the kitchen table with his mug of tea and, for a few moments, stared aimlessly through the window. Out in the street the world was coming to life. A few early birds were already making their way to work, hurrying along in the cold post-dawn light, their faces pale, their movements automatic, their eyes glazed over. Poor sods, thought Daniel, as he brought the mug of hot tea to his lips. Still, at least they have jobs to go to; at least they have work.
Daniel gazed across at the framed photograph that hung on the wall next to the clock and sighed. Daniel’s photographic career had been triggered by events during his University days when, disenchanted with the rather sterile, academic content of his degree course in engineering, he searched for something more vital and creative to occupy him. He was a bright individual who, rather than applying himself to a single pursuit, preferred to flit from one interest to the next like a peripatetic butterfly, never settling on any one subject long enough to master it but always capable of grasping the salient features en route.
In this manner, while pursuing his uninspiring degree, Daniel flirted with subjects as diverse as sociology, bio-chemistry and developmental psychology. Along the way he was sidetracked for several weeks by a near-obsessional fascination with comparative religion - even now he liked to think of this as his “searching phase” - and at one point he approached the Dean of Studies with a proposal to change his major.
Most of the alternatives interested him initially, but he soon became bored or restless and before long he would, inevitably, find himself back on the trail, looking for some discipline, some branch of knowledge, or just something of substance that could occupy him not for just a term or two but for life.
In the end it was a severe toothache that was his salvation.
Although Daniel had a tendency to ignore the various messages his nervous system sent him concerning body-maintenance, he was never able to postpone the inevitable for long when it came to his teeth. And it was while thumbing through a copy of National Geographic in the dentist’s waiting room that he struck gold. An extraordinary photo-essay on the roaming tribal peoples of Rajasthan in north-west India captured his senses and fired his imagination.
The pictures showed a wonderfully exotic selection of brightly coloured nomads with their camels in various locations; set off against sun-baked deserts, seated around sparking fires by night or just engaged in their daily duties. The images were so beautiful, revealed such detail and delight, that for several minutes, while he studied the photographs and allowed himself to be drawn in by their seductive mix of mystery and rnajesty, he forgot about the raging pain in his corroded molar.