Every few nights for the past month, I’ve dreamt about Kenya. It’s always a similar landscape and plot – I’m in the neighborhood of my home and school, in that suburban northwest corner of Nairobi’s sprawling slopes. In most of them, I find that I’m returning to ISK for a few more classes, ten years on, and I’m both shocked and surprised at this turn of events. In one, I’m getting into a bus just down the street from our house, right where Lower Kabete Road turned into Kyuna, and trying to navigate the friendly driver into stopping by my house before school so that I can put some decent clothes on for my first day. The streets are soaked in color, the red dirt kicking up along the side of the road, the blue sky draped above the trees. I keep getting very close but not quite making it to our home, but I’m not fussed, so distracted by the wonder of the familiarity of it all.


In another, I’m with Marnix and Seigfried, my inseparable sidekicks for the best months of my life there. I’m thrilled, so thrilled to be around them again without any of the venom and animosity that marked the decline of our little triumvirate. I keep patting their heads delightedly and surprising them with hugs as we amble along Marnix’s street – Kitisuru Road, which I also know in the dream.
In yet another, I’m back on campus, in the sun-drenched fields of my high school, chatting animatedly with the still-teenagered students that surround me, asking when I attended, what I’m doing back. In many of these dreams, I’m eagerly introducing Stuart around, or I know he’ll join me soon and I’m soaking up memories to tell him about. I always know where I am in relation to the town, which is the mark of an important dream. I’m never hazy on the details, events follow a certain logic, I don’t get frustratingly transported from one spot to another. These aren’t nightmares or anxiety dreams, and they’re not scattered absurd dreams. They’re not even nostalgic fantasies, per se. I’m not getting a do-over, a chance to right any wrongs or reenact tough moments to make myself come out better. The message is very clear – I am in Nairobi as an adult and for good reason, it is bringing me joy. Also, I still know all the street names and how to get from here to there.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. The returning to school is quite plain – I’m thinking about school a lot these days. The sheer exhiliration of returning to Kenya itself is also obvious – it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived, and there were so many firsts. I was 16. Everything that happens when you’re 16 becomes larger than life, exposed with glaring vibrancy on some photographic plate that never fades in richness, only gets more hazy around the edges.
And to differentiate this pattern from my norm, I rarely give more than a moment’s thought to dreams. I wake up, relay snippets of them to Stuart, and basically forget them. I identify what they’re relating to in my daily life, or I laugh at their absurdity. Dreams aren’t always pertinent – I often think of them as my imagination exercising itself. But this is getting to the point that I’m noticing. If I don’t subconciously desire to return, literally, to my youth (and I don’t), what is all this about?
So for some reason, things occur to me on my walk to the subway. Perhaps because it’s just a dull boring walk, one of the ugliest sides of Astoria that I only use in the morning because it’s the quickest. So I don’t look around much, I am still half-awake and susceptible to the whims of my scattered mind. So this morning, I was thinking about this dream-fixation with Kenya that’s only cropped up in the past month. And I plucked something else about Kenya out of a musty drawer – I never write fiction about Africa. Ever.
I have what I thought was a good reason for this – it would seem like a sell-out, like an obvious violation of my attempts to truly create fiction, not simply rest on the undeserved laurels of having lived in exotic places. I’ve never considered writing fiction around my own experiences – in the few times I’ve tried, it’s seemed forced and uninteresting.
But perhaps I need to revisit this point of view and see if it should be tweaked. Perhaps there’s a reason that Kenya is on my mind in the weeks that my immediate future is being decided? Is it some agent provocateur in my subconscious, trying to tell me that perhaps I never write around my own experience because I’m afraid it won’t be good enough? Or that I’m aspiring to an ideal I don’t need, because buckets of great writers have shamelessly drawn on their own life and the only trick they needed was talent at making it relevant to everyone else?
And as quickly as I thought about my own firm justifications, a story started brewing, mostly fiction but with enough sense of place that I knew the story revolved around my non-fiction memories. What does that mean, that I was able to see an interesting story in the fabric of something I’ve long refused to even bring into the shop, so to speak?
It’s hard to make clear to you, the feeling these dreams are giving me. It makes me wish, when I wake up, that I could really show you the dream, as if it were a home movie. This delight in a place that I once loved, it casts this neon glow over the images of the dreams. Walking down Kitisuru, I remember looking up into the canopy of trees and gasping in awe at the leaves, that looked like fern fronds in a million different shades. When looking along the back roads of Kyuna for my house, the kombi broke down, and I jumped out and dipped my bare feet in a stream, not caring that the red dust settled between my toes as I walked back to the van. When I was with the boys, I kept playing with their hair, playing with the german shepherds that walked alongside us, everything feeling very pleasingly tactile, like some esctasy trip. I loved being there, and when I woke up, all I wanted to do was write it all down to capture those feelings of good will.
What does that mean? Far be it from me to psycho-analyze my dreams, so perhaps they are simply just feel-good dreams that my imagination is indulging in to combat the stress of the past few weeks. But what good’s a subconscious if it’s not helping me sort out what I want from my life and by extension, my writing? Why these dreams now, when I’m thinking so much about the future of this ball of unformed talent I hope I have? If the dreams themselves are linking up with other thoughts about Africa and imagination, maybe I should start listening?
Reading over this, there are an unusually high number of question marks in this post.