Urushi and Other Stories from Ososo

EBHESHINA-1

EBHESHINA

‘....if you have ever experienced the mystery of Nature that men call ebheshina...dream...then this is for you....’

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Many years ago, as a little child, in response to one of my numerous and persistent questions, my father told me that when one dreamt, one was practically falling.

He told me that dreaming was like falling from the peak of a huge mountain or tumbling into the dark depths of a bottomless abyss. This definition-his definition- of ebheshina didn’t only scare me at that time, it also did a lot to confuse me and as well set the tone for what the concept of dream would mean to me in later years. In retrospect, I understand now that it was the sort of answer one gave to an inquisitive child. That kind of answer that was meant to scare and at the same time discourages the child from threading on dangerous terrains. Terrain of enquiries that was too problematic for young minds to process. Despite this response from my father as an adult whose sole intention then was to discourage me, a nagging child, because he felt I was too young to understand certain mysteries about life, though scared and confused, I was not satisfied. Deep inside me, I knew there had to be more to ebheshina; more to the explanation and the reason men dream.

Today, a close inspection of this Ososo word reveals ebheshina as a unique word that stomach so much mystery. What more, to a stranger to the Ososo dialect the word is as enthralling to the eyes when penned to paper as it jingles in the ear when spoken. It is a term little understood by many, yet so many more throughout history have claimed it opened windows in their minds to the unknown; vouchsafing them some glimpse of the divine. A term through which they’ll always be quick to say their minds were illuminated with visions of the transcendent. Revelations that they have claim most often transformed them into vessels bearing messages of hope to some and dispatches of doom to others. In the tongue of the Ghotuo-Uneme-Yekhee branch of the Edoid linguistic lineage, a tongue spoken by an equally inimitable people who today occupy the land we call Ososo, this word is most often uttered with some reverence. With some awe as if doing otherwise would attract some type of misfortune. This is the attitude of the people of Ososo- that scenic town of streams and rocks in the undulating Somorika hills in the northern parts of Edo State in Nigeria- to word ebheshina.

Even though I did not entirely agree with my father’s definition of the term dream, as if to buttress his assertion, many times in the wake of a dream, especially my childhood nightmares, I would usually find myself convulsing on the ground from horror. I would have literally fallen from the spring bed which was my usual companion in those nights, in those innocent days as a little boy. Though, the tumble from the bed would have been within a quarter of fraction because of the proximity of the bed to the floor, to me, it would seem like literally falling from the peak of a huge mountain or into a bottomless pit. The fall would be so long as if I had been falling the entire night. Accompanying those falls would my child-like, dreadful screams and beads of sweat casing all of my body as though I had plunged myself into a big bowl of water just seconds before the fall. Apparently, the shock from my nightmare and of seeing myself spread across the cemented floor of our room and parlour affair in those days, like a discarded empty sack of beans, was always too much for my immature psyche to process and so it was my mind that always shook me awake and back to reality upon impact on the plastic-tiled floor. This was the common experience as a child and the phenomenon I had had to live with most of my teenage years. It was spectacles like these that made the word ebheshina to keep echoing in my mind throughout my teenage years as if a lunatic was banging away at some huge church bell inside my head.

I didn’t understand what my childhood dreams were or what meaning they held throughout those days. As far as I can tell today, for me, there is still, as it was before, a stark misunderstanding what dreams are. Usually, when people cannot or do not get a full grasp of something, their misunderstanding most often tends to open such things as they cannot comprehend to tremendous speculation. And those speculations usually end up with the tendency of making such things either feared or misrepresented. All my life, apart from the fear of ebheshina that had become part of my psyche, my head has been filled with conjectures about the true meaning of dreams and the purpose they served. I have always asked and continue to ask myself, why do humans dream?

To this question of why humans dream, I am sure some people’s lips would stretch in a mocking and maybe knowing smile and they’ll say to themselves, ‘oh that’s simple. We dream for so and so reason...’ Yet I believe there is no simple answer to this question of why men dream. There are several instances throughout history for example, of people who have appeared and have even changed the course of events in history simply because they went to bed the night before as usual, but rose a different person the morning after following a dream they had. One of the greatest religions the world has ever known received a great boost around the 300s AD as a result of one of the dreams of Emperor Constantine. In what I presume may have appeared like a vision, the emperor claimed to have seen the Chi Rho sign, the Greek letters which he believed had assured him victory in battle. ‘In this sign, conquer’ the emperor was instructed in his dream according to Christian tradition. People believed him. His troops staked their lives, bled and died for it. For his ebheshina. The emperor went to battle and true, he won with a decisive victory. Even though the Christians were a persecuted lot before the emperor’s dream, their religion quickly rose to become a state religion at the behest of the emperor; the greatest the world has ever seen. This happened after his dream and subsequent victory in battle. This, to me, explains the power of dreams in a literal and very real sense. Why is this so? What really happened? Can there ever be a satisfactory explanation and definition of this thing we call ebheshina?

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Well, I had a dream. And this dream was neither one in which I imagined myself falling as was customary in my childhood days nor was it one in which I was awake like some people have claimed to experience. It was nothing like day dreaming. It was nothing like the religious visions that some religious charlatans ride on to swindle gullible worshipers today. No. Again, it was not the usual childhood nightmares that characterized my early years. It was a dream so real it could have been Christmas day. A dream so real it could have been the lines in my palms, something that still confounds me even now that I am punching these keys-letters that are forming these words- on the keyboard of my computer.

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