Not so for me.

All my life, my nights have been shaken by the same and only nightmare. My mind has that wonderful creative ability of mapping recent events onto the constant theme to paint it with a new and unknown coat of believability and perpetually renew its painful bite. We wouldn’t want to get used to it, like an old horror movie seen too many times to jump out of our couch when the villain pulls out the pliers, now, would we? It’s like a Photoshop layer of moustaches and a beard over your enemy’s face. The look is fresh and engaging, but behind it lies the same old beast that has tortured you all your life.

It’s probably very Freudian. But even writing about it brings the taste of puke to my mouth. It always starts with me walking around a place that feels familiar but not homely. Last night, it was all about Marrakesh. About me walking the Derbs in search of pictures and people to talk to. And, as usual, no one around. Nothing unpleasant up to here. Then I cross a familiar object that seems to trigger the nightmare, strangely enough, very often a cat, the animal I love most. Marrakesh is riddled with young cats, which makes you wonder what happens to the older ones.

Last night’s cat, I remember well. Walking in a back alley where I got lost trying to go from the Saadian Tombs to Bahia Palace without using the overcrowded main arteries, it took absolutely no notice of my as I crouched down to include it in my frame of the narrow street. Interested in me or not, El Kitty flicks the switch in my dream and everything goes berserk. The colours explode into ridiculous hues, which is unusual in my nightmares and more typical of my Blue Dreams. The pace accelerates and I lose control of the dream altogether. Drat !

After concluding I wasn’t taking drugs at the age of 6 and checking my history for signs of accidents, natural disasters and military doctors ruled out drug induced and post-traumatic stress disorders. Since my childhood really wasn’t unhappy and I’d never shown any signs of schizophrenia or unstable dream/wake periods, pharmacological treatment was attempted, then dropped, nine months later: chloral hydrate, benzodiazapines had failed at curing the ailment and threatened to make my psychological matters worse, a fact I did nothing to improve by starting steeling from my mother’s local wool shop, relishing the terror that induced in my parents I got caught every time and invented the mot unbelievable fib every time.

Eventually, though, something truly positive did turn up, from the most unlikely source. Dad’s esoteric friend, of OOBE fame, suggested Dream Yoga to my parents, a proposition they toned down to a more mundane relaxation program with a trained psychologist, Dr Selmann.

But those were wonderful times. Dr Selmann was a cuddly old geezer who put on a tough face when discussing progress with my parents but was the softest heart with me. He once told how irritated he was with parents unsatisfied with their children, because he couldn’t have any himself and would have given the world to raise even the bonkiest specimen. This sounded highly unprofessional, even to a 9 year old, but it was exactly the attitude I needed at the time.

To encourage my parents, I stopped my merinos and mohair fetishism and took to the local library instead, feeling like a teenager quickly flicking though the pages of his first razzle magazine as I slipped rapidly in and out of the esoteric section, hiding anything interesting I could find inside a larger image book back at the kid’s section. Among the treasures I found, two marked my imagination for ever: the Sri Aurobindo comments on the Bhagavad Gita, of which I understood very little and Samael Aun Weor’s Dream Yoga, which was even more cryptic. I read the same pages over and over again, feeling their meaning sink in me even though I still had no intellectual grasp over them. RAOM GAOM. RAOM GAOM. For me, those were the keys to a deep inner word life and to a secret and unmanifested society of people united, without knowing, in the desire to learn more about life than maths, irregular verbs and the birth dates of kings. I was ten and I was becoming a Jedi. RAOM GAOM.

Together, Dr Selmann and his invisible assistants made great progress. After a month, I was able to remember most my dreams, often up to three every night. After six, my recurrent nightmare which, to be frank, was still totally out of control, at least seemed to trouble me much less frequently. By that time, we had stopped doing anything vaguely medical, talking instead about my new readings. Tom, as I recall him telling me to call him, but only in the privacy of consultation, was an old school church boy. A true product of traditional England and utterly fascinated by the exoticism of my lecture, though not enough to commit the sacrilege of reading for himself. Instead, he would ask me to focus on certain passages during my secret visits to the library’s forbidden quarters and we would discuss them at length during the following sessions. It was obvious he was impatiently waiting for them as much as I was. At first, it was equally obvious he didn’t catch on. He understood the words that eluded me, but the deep meaning that sunk into me just bounced on the hard surface of his education. Still he ploughed on, either determined to break his rigid armour or simply happy to feel like a visitor to a foreign land. And after some time, some his remarks began making sense to me, bringing a understandable western slant to the unfathomable pantheon I had been describing. After two year, we commonly and reluctantly agreed that it was time to stop. Our talks were getting stale and my parents were getting twitchy so Dr Selmann assessed how much better the situation was and pointed out the tremendous progress we had achieved together. From that day on, I did my best to hide my nightmare to the rest of the world.

Until I met Nichole.

As a chronic affliction, it seemed to bother the doctors a great deal when I happened to me as a kid, but for some reason, the situation is obviously less alarming to them these days. Maybe it’s that they think I can live with it or simply a hunch that if it never hurt me before, it was unlikely to do so now. Maybe the nurses and doctors found me cuter as a child and cared more. Whatever, they now seem happy to see me again and to have an odd plaything on which to test their latest theories, techniques and equipment. Can’t really blame them, being in research myself, though I crunch topological concepts, not other people’s brains.

For many reasons, my involvement with all that brain twirling actually followed the opposite path. As a child, I was riddled with manifestations of weirdness and the Blue Dreams, as my Dad used to call them, were the rather enjoyable tip of the loony iceberg. Under the stromy waters laid constant nightmares, flight feelings and other psychological syndromes that remained equally unexplained but scared the shit out of me on a whole other level.

Also, my nightmares probably helped me achieve the education and professional record I have today. The need to control my mind, to shield my consciousness from outside distractions (or, more accurately, inner mental turmoil) must have helped my brain reach the unusual levels of concentration it does. Necessity at work, I guess. I could have simply gone potty like anyone decent, but something or someone chose to make me great at sciences instead. Ah, well … My Blue Dreams on the other hand, while still very pleasant, do get in the way of my everyday life a lot more and, more to the point, they bring me back to my darkest episodes with Nichole.

Anyway, these days and for the past three years ago, my recurrent nightmare has been safely kept in check and barely a trace of worry at the back of my mind, whereas my “Blue Dreams” continue to pounce at random, inactivating me at the flick of a switch. I have lied to the doctors for the past 15 years knowing they would not let me drive or live a normal life otherwise. Thankfully, this ever happened in their company, which is a wonder, considering how intimate we have become (actually, how intimate they have become with me, since I don’t really recall seeing any of the in the nick on an exam bed. But then, I’m half crazy).

Over the years, doctors and nurses from small village practises to the UCL Neuroimaging Center and the Queen Square Institute of Neurology have tried their best to find the key to my puzzling games my mind plays. In my ordered theory of things, there are actually three types of doctors: the well meaning family helping type 1 that puts comfort before everything else, with samples covering the whole gamut of technical competence; venal type 2 is fat and, I like to think, ugly, has an eye on the watch and is more concerned with paying the petrol for the Cayenne parked outside; type 3 is tall and intelligent looking with narrow glasses and piercing eyes absorbed in research. Type 3 sacrifices the individual for the well being of the race and the advance of science.

• It was a wannabe Type 3 that had my eyes pulled out to obtain retinal cell samples when I was seven. Check Ganglion cells of all categories.
• A whole battery of tests later ruled out a rare juvenile case of Gerstmann syndrome. Check Parietal lobe.
• Akinetopsia was the next suspect in the lineup, because of my (unfortunate) description of the visual phenomenon accompanying the Blue Dream: the frozen images, the loss of motion and distance perception. Scans, strobes and tissue samples ruled that one out as well. Check Gyrus Angularis. Pity, really since a little mess in Brodmann area 39 would have conveniently explained the Out Of Body trips one of Dad’s colleagues suggested I was experiencing, causing Mom to freak out for months and almost force me into exorcism.

By the time all this was dealt with, I was old and confident enough to tell the smartest professors to suck eggs and the rhythm slowed down.

Last Sunday, it happened again in the flight from Marrakech to Heathrow, just before the final descent. Mike Vaughn, that burly Ozzie son of a roo sitting next to me realised something was happening well before I did. Heaving his huge carcass over me, he asked me whether all was OK, mentioning I looked paler that a ghost’s arse on a rainy day. I actually felt just fine, quite sleepy and cozy in the sun pouring in through the scratched window, shooting the clouds to while away the flight, as always in similar conditions. The only oddity was the hum from the plane that seemed louder than usual. I turned around to answer, quickly assembling some witty retort and was out in a flash.

First, colours go all nonsensical. They change rapidly, increasing in contrast and mixing to a very dark scene. Not at all like fainting, more Millenium Falcon acceleration without the shooting stars. A sense that everything is suspended and black. Then everything goes frozen blue. The most intense electric blue. It’s like the whole universe has stopped except for the blue light. I love that light so much. I’m not the only one. Ask Giotto. Ask Picasso. Ask Klein. Ask Majorelle, come to think of it.

Then the weirdest part kicks in. I can feel presences. People or things. And the light swirls around me like shiny ribbons that seem to know me. I know it sounds crazy. Would it help at all if I told you the lights are Dragons ?

Now, for the first time in many years, I’m really worried about the nightmare.

Last evening conference treat: a private evening and dinner in the gardens of the Majorelle Villa located just north of the hotel, within walking distance.  The walk spares me the constant chatter of PhD and post doc students and the unwanted questions of twitchy professors, all in the official bus. The smallish gardens are a haven of peace, a benediction after two days and almost 40 miles of walking in and around the Medina.

After a dull start to the day, the sky opened up in mid afternoon, bathing us in balmy spring temperatures. Yet, the shadow and humidity of the gardens make the ambiance much cooler than anticipated. It is really surprising how much natural water Marrakesh seems to enjoy.

After a guided tour of the gardens, I escape the crowd to shoot the plants without the herds of posing nerds. The organisers have obviously equated Morocco with heat so our little lecture on Jacques Majorelle is inflicted outdoors and very soon, the concert of chattering teeth instills a flamenco ambiance to the session. Still, it is worth is as the seating is arranged around the piece de resistance of the visit: the blue villa itself. Why anyone would go to the trouble of leaving an art deco family in North Eastern France to settle in an red and ochre Islamic city in a cubic house painted blue is interestingly explained by a local guide whose evident passionate knowledge and ripe age suggest he was a close friend of the painter.

The villa is stunning, standing like a ship in the calm evening. The design is modern, with a small overhanging terrace that Franck Lloyd Wright himself would endorse, unusual proportions and weird but well integrated Moroccan style add-ons that contribute to an impression of deliberate and well controlled exoticism.

The deep blue sends shivers in my spine and brings back the visions of Nichole I have been trying so hard to chase from my mind. It oppresses me at first, but no seizure this time, and as the evening progresses, the diminishing natural light is replaced with low power artificial street lighting and candles in traditional lanterns. The effect from the low flickering needles combined with the lazy orange curtain falling from the sky is uttuerly soothing. As the sun gois to its resting place and the sky turns darker than I thought possible in such a large city, the obscurity surrounds us and the villa actually looks like it’s glowing. The coloured ponts that looked so vibrant during the day against the dark villa walls now fade into the night leaving front stage to their monumental background.

The uneasy feel of coincidence follows me back to the hotel room. But its been a great evening. Bathing in genius is a blessing.

The morning spree proved a right mood lifter. The conference can live without me this afternoon. New assignment: Architecture.

The texture and colour of the sky do not mix well on the Almoravid Qoubba, giving a holiday resort postcard feel to the shot, so I post process for a slight cross process effect. The standard filter settings are way overboard, manual contrast adjustments with curves on each channel produce a much more satisfying look. Faded and slightly unnatural.

Around the Koutoubia

This was a nice place. I wonder how St Ansel would have rendered it?

For the black and white:

* Contrast boost in the Raw File
* Then a first saturation ajustment layer in CS3 with a colour blend and 100% opacity
* Second saturation adjustment layer, normal blend and total desaturation. 100% Opacity.

Playing around with the hue setting in the first layer, I got this rendition. A bit of burning in the sky and presto. Not a macth for el maestro but not that far out.

St Ansel Koutoubia

Instead, today’s program is shoot shoot shoot. I vividly Lorenza Saitta urging the audience to “Read Read Read” at my first conference, centuries ago. Practice makes perfect. The morning’s task, bring back pictures of people and faces. Focus. Concentrate. Get a bucket full of colour and forget Nichole. Again.

Cat’s don’t count, but what the heck. My self-assigned quota is fulfilled, time for a little fun.