A man comes into a pub looking terrible. Rubbing his eyes and sighing, he orders several stiff drinks at once and sits at the bar looking the very picture of misery. When the barman ventures to ask what’s wrong, the man explains that he hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep for more than a month – because of a recurrent dream.
“I’m a lorry driver,” he explains, “and I mainly work routes from London up to Manchester, Liverpool, and other places up there. I drive long shifts, and get really tired out. Sometimes I try to kip in the lorry if I’m getting too dead beat at the wheel. But as soon as ever I get to sleep, I start dreaming, ever so vividly, that I’m still driving the lorry. The dream’s not only boring, but tiring – it’s as if I’m not getting any sleep at all!”
A man at the bar beside him says that there’s a psychiatrist with a clinic nearby who’s very good at hypnotherapy, and stuff to do with dreams and sleep. The man is glad to hear of this, and goes off to make an appointment.
A few days later the lorry driver comes back into the pub, looking a little better, but still far from well.
“I’m not saying he knows nothing,” he says of the psychiatrist, “but he couldn’t cure me. He said he would hypnotize me, get inside my head, and take over the lorry in my dream. And he does, too. When I’ve got up the M4 and well on up the M5 or M6, there he is, in the dream, hailing me by the roadside. He gets up into the cabin and takes the wheel, and I go to sleep in the bunk in the cabin – and, from then on, I really do sleep.”
A couple of weeks later, another man comes into the pub looking very tired. He also has a recurrent vivid dream, far from tedious, but really exhausting.
“As soon as ever I get to sleep, I have a wonderfully erotic dream,” he says. “A great crowd of beautiful naked women start arriving and demanding sex. I keep doing it all night – ever so vividly, but without waking up like blokes do who have ordinary wet dreams. You might think me lucky, but you really can have too much of a good thing. I haven’t had a wink of proper sleep for a year.”
They advise him to see the psychiatrist.
A couple of weeks later the second man comes into the pub again. Like the lorry driver, he admits that the psychiatrist knows a thing or two about sleep, dreams, and hypnosis. But: “He told me he would hypnotize me, and arrange to take over screwing the women at about 2.30 a.m. And sure enough, at 2.30 he appears in the dream and starts screwing them, just like he said.”
“Well, at least he’s halved your problem,” the barman says. “At least you can get a few hours kip in for the rest of the night.”
“Oh no I can’t!” he says. “When he comes in to screw the women, I spend the rest of the night dreaming I’m driving a lorry up the M6!”
