Coconut Dream

The wind and the surf are quarreling. A coconut falls, tries to settle the argument. Then, one by one, from a large overhanging tree thick with wandering branches, a troop of Sykes monkeys descends onto the roof and begins foraging for windfall on the terra-cotta shingles. 

The commotion awakens you. With one eye half opened you see a tropical sunrise. You are lying in a four poster bed in the centre of a vast bedroom sparsely decorated with antique wooden furniture, surrounded by levered glass doors. The doors are all open, allowing the fragrance of seaweed, salt water, and frangipani to waft into your room.

Without leaving your bed, you part the mosquito netting and divine a broad swathe of ocean, sapphire in the distance and mottled emerald and turquoise over the reef. A string of white-capped breakers stretches from horizon to horizon, tweaks your primordial memory ("Which way do we go?"). Six dhows are sailing up the coast, helped on by a brisk morning northerly, and their progress is marked by a grove of palm trees woven into the space between. 

At this point you may struggle to recall how you came to be sleeping in a paradisiacal villa on the Swahili coast. Maybe this is the dream…

Monkeys from gorillaland on Vimeo.