#FridayFlash: Who Dreams?

by Peter Etherington @petherin

In my dream the air tickled the inside of my head. The back half of my skull had been cut away, and most of the brain removed. What was odd about this (if you'll forgive me overlooking the obvious) was that I was on the operating table, but I was also one of the surgeons.

The me on the table couldn't see anything. It was unaware. But the surgeon me looked inside my head and saw a complicated layer of brain clinging to the inside of my skull, like porridge in a hairy bowl. There were metal struts in there, holding the squashy grey matter in place like scaffolding for my thoughts. There were also guide-rails, along which I intended to slot a new lump of brain. I held it in my hands – it felt like a wad of sticky minced meat. It had an irregular shape, like a large potato you'd reject at the supermarket, stuck atop another and shunted forward so it overhung. Two slender red rails ran along one side, which I assumed was either the top or the bottom.

I lined it up with the rails in my head and tried to push it in, being careful not to trap any stray strands of meat - I didn't relish forgetting how to pee because I crushed the piece that controlled the bladder muscles. But it wouldn't go in. I jiggled it, but it refused to slide any further than halfway. Loathe to force it, I took it out with great care, and a colleague relieved me of the stodgy mass and turned it round, slotting it in with ease.

My head felt heavier, though a draught still cooled those secret internal crevices that no draught had ever cooled before. My head, sliced open like a boiled egg, felt vulnerable, but in this operating theatre, it was a vulnerability I didn't mind. I felt safe. I was not concerned that, say, a bird would flap into the cavity and scratch its claws against the exposed tissue. No one was going to sneeze into it. It would be all right.

“Take a picture,” I said to my mother, who sat nearby, observing. Her red hair snaked from her scalp and her white coat sparkled. I pointed to the back of my noggin – that of the surgeon, not the me on the table. I couldn't see the back of the surgeon's skull, but I assumed it had been excavated in the same drastic way as the patient's. Yet the surgeon was up and about, not asleep on the slab. It would be far more interesting to get a picture of his swede, hacked open and on display as he walked and talked. Or rather, as I walked and talked. For a surgeon, I was finding this quite disorientating.

She had an instant camera, as providence would have it, and she pointed it at the back of my surgeon head while I jabbed an excited forefinger at the gaping hole in the patient's head. A mind-bender, that, I told myself.

She took the picture and the flash made its weird poppy-squelch noise, then the photo slipped from the camera's slit. I took it with excitement, and watched the greyness fade into an image. There was the surgeon, but it wasn't me. His head was intact. He had a pale pink pate with thinning grey hair where the yawning red skull-pit should be. The patient on the table wasn't me either. His head was gouged out, but it wasn't me.

I looked at my mother. She had changed. No longer was she a woman in a blinding white coat, aged around sixty. Now she was a white box covered in lights, red leads sprouting from every nook and edge. On the front were the words CEREBRA-BOT 500, and underneath this: SURGICAL BRAIN INTERFACE. But the fact still remained; it was my mother.

At the end of the operation, it was switched off, and my dream came to an end.