THE ELEPHANT THOUGHTS OF AMBROSE GODDARD
Copyright 1995 © Carmel
Bird All rights reserved.
Certain African tribes believe that after death the chief of the tribe becomes an elephant matriarch, respected and honored, and an ally when members of the tribe are hunting elephants. As I feel myself falling asleep at night I experience myself as the elephant matriarch, appearing in silence from a swirling mist, roaming hugely among thick greenery and large, colorful flowers, and then I drift back not the mist, fade, and with soft lilac cloud-forms drawn across my eyes, I sleep. The feeling is profoundly satisfying to me, and I have all my life sought to understand it. It is an element of the beauty of sleep itself, can is perhaps partly what has brought me to study the function of sleep in the life of the mind, the health of the mind, and to apply the science of what I have learned of sleep to the treatment of my patients.
It was with fear and dread that I learned, when I was in my early teens, of John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. For a time my own elephant feelings had to be suppressed as I felt myself in danger of succumbing to the disease from which Merrick suffered. Consequently, my sleep was, for some months – it could have been a year – severely disturbed. Such are the fears that children suffer, unspoken. How could I, a healthy Australian boy, mad about cricket and football and science and even Shakespeare, how could I confide in anyone the reasons for my insomnia?
I recall my mother decided I had toothache – strange the solutions we find to each other’s problems – and I was always at the dentist. This was in the days before the elegant anesthetics of recent years. Anything the dentist did to me was painful in the extreme and only served to increase my nervousness and sleeplessness.
I lived in horror of the dentist, and I found it not too difficult to connect the thought of the tusks of an elephant with my own fairly respectable teeth. If I could remember dreams (and I can’t, thank God) I would probably be able to recount wonderful tales of my tusks and my trunk and the colonies of vermin that live in the folds of my magnificent dream-elephant skin.
What really matters is that my Elephant Consciousness is always present so that I know I command great power and respect in the world in which I work. It’s better than being a lion, in fact. Although I have never betrayed the depth of my elephant-being to Abigail, I know she has some inkling of my elephant thoughts because of the games we sometimes play where she rides me round the room before I turn on her and subdue her. This is very enjoyable.
On Sundays when I walk along the cliff-tops with the dogs, I adopt a wonderfully particular ambling gait. I stroll my elephant stroll across the top of the world; I look down on the endless waves, crawling like furrows in a field, viridian, aquamarine, beneath me. I experience at those times a deep sense of well-being in my roaming large-animal self, and, in the solitude of the windy cliff-top, I trumpet and bellow to the sky.