The DREAM

Dr Roopa Banerjee hated Mondays. It was an irrational attitude that flavoured the start of her week with a sourness that she invariably fought hard to swallow. In the long, sleepless hours of the night, she often pondered the roots of such an illogical viewpoint. Yet its cause, so far, had failed to reveal itself to her. It was, like so many other things in her currently rather disjointed mind, ‘temporarily unavailable for recovery’. Tidying her already spotless desk, she allowed herself a faint smile as the phrase ran through her head. It had become a firm favourite of hers, with its blanket covering for a multitude of cerebral transgressions. It put everything, nice and neatly, in the ‘too hard’ box. Still, it would only be a matter of time before the box required opening. She knew it. Even she couldn’t take the easy way out forever.

Her first appointment of the day was with a new patient. Although here, of course, in this ultra-modern consulting room that she inhabited for the first three days of every week, the word ‘patient’ was frowned upon. The men and women who came in through her door with their array of complicated sleep disorders were ‘clients’, mostly professional people for whom exhaustion had become the paralysing norm. Their maladies varied from common insomnia right the way through to narcolepsy and sleep apnoea, with more than a smattering of nightmares, night terrors and sleepwalking thrown