Laughing in My Sleep

You Simply Have to Have a Sense of Humour

I woke up this morning actually laughing in my sleep, giggling and physically chuckling to myself. It is a thing for me. After two nights of horrible, vivid nightmares which I will spare you, I woke up LOL, laughing out loud.

I remember why.

A few days ago we had discussed replacing the dining room chairs. They have gradually broken over the years, the fate of well-used chairs that have crossed countries in shipping containers and survived two generations of family life. In my dream, in one of my now very characteristic impulsive moments, I had bought the first chairs I saw online and somehow arranged for them to be assembled without anyone noticing.

Then came the reveal.

My wife and children walked into the dining room to discover these truly ghastly chairs: enormous black monstrosities . Some looked horrified. One of them started laughing uncontrollably. So did I. In the dream I was laughing my guts out, and then I woke up still laughing.

I think that moment, actual laughing out loud rather than my more common nocturnal soundtrack of snorting, sleep talking, full conversations and snoring, contained a message. You simply have to laugh at the absurdity woven through the tragedy of the situation. And over the past 36 hours, there has been no shortage of material.

It reminded me of something my son said as we walked home from Synagogue on Friday night. I had gone, and overall it was okay. My legs were painful, though, and at one point I mentioned that perhaps I should simply have worn socks without shoes. That gives me a few extra centimetres of comfort on the wheelchair footrest and makes a surprising difference.

“I couldn’t do that,” I said. “It would look odd.”

He barely needed to answer. We both realised immediately how ridiculous that sounded. At the time I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses at night to shield me from the light, bright yellow earplugs to block the noise, especially the scraping of chairs as people stood and sat, and I was sitting in a wheelchair with a carer who had wheeled me in. Under those circumstances, socks without shoes were hardly going to be the defining oddity of the evening.

The fact that I was choosing pain in order to preserve some entirely imaginary standard of normal appearance was, frankly, mildly ridiculous.

Then there was my leg.

Thankfully it has improved slightly, and hot water bottles have genuinely helped. At one stage the pain was widespread enough that I had three on at once on Shabbat. Later, after a walk, or more accurately a ride, with my carer, wife, mother and Buddy (our dog), which was probably longer than it should have been and significantly more painful, I abruptly switched strategy and went cold instead.

There i sat with lying there with a packet of cauliflower, a packet of brussels sprouts and an ice pack arranged across my leg in full vegetable formation. It looked utterly absurd.

As if not enough already, a little before Shabbat brought another moment.

Recently I tried CBD oil for pain and anxiety, entirely legal and well reviewed here and it has I think helped. I have never been remotely drug-adjacent in my life, unless you count alcohol and the industrial quantities of prescription medication I now take daily. Impulsivity, curiosity and encouraging reviews persuaded me to buy a CBD vape in Mango Haze flavour in addition to the discreet oil product.

I had absolutely no idea how to use it.

One of my children suggested I simply get stuck in and take a puff. I inhaled far too enthusiastically. Clouds came billowing out everywhere. And the truth of the product, on that first attempt, turned out to lie not in the Mango but entirely in the Haze.

The expression on my child’s face, watching their father, lifelong anti-smoking and anti-drugs campaigner, suddenly sitting there vaping mango-scented CBD oil like a confused teenager, was genuinely priceless. I really didn’t like that haze that it brought on but maybe it was the volume I consumed.

And then there was the Champions League Final.

Here in Israel we caught the end of it, me, a Spurs fan, watching alongside my mother, a lifelong Arsenal supporter. When she saw the flicker of genuine satisfaction cross my face at Arsenal losing, she nearly lost it herself.

For the record, I know Arsenal have been magnificent this season. Rationally, I understand all of that. But as the final whistle blew, something deep, tribal and entirely irrational stirred inside me, something I had honestly assumed PSP had dissolved.

Apparently not.

Decades of football rivalry, completely absurd and completely pointless, were still alive and well inside me.

PSP is terrible. Truly terrible. There are so many painful realities buried even within the small episodes I have described above. But at some point, and I can only speak for myself, I have to acknowledge the absurdity through humour. It is the only way I know how to cope.

And on the evidence of this particular 36 hours, I am clearly not short of material.