Some dreams disappear within minutes of waking. Others arrive with so much detail that they feel less like dreams and more like memories.
While recovering in intensive care, Tim Westall experienced the second kind.
In The Fentanyl Chronicles: Tales of Delirium from Intensive Care, he recalls one particularly ambitious night in which his mind decided that the woodland near his home needed a café.
Not just a kiosk. Not a coffee cart. A proper café and diner.
In the dream, the location was obvious. At the far end of a stretch of woodland stood an area used by truck drivers, dog walkers, and hikers. There was nowhere to stop for coffee, nowhere to sit, and nowhere to make life more comfortable for the people passing through.
The solution seemed perfectly sensible.
Build a café.
The dream quickly became a full business project. Plans were drawn up. Builders were recruited. Equipment was ordered. Tables, kitchen facilities, a dog feeding station, and even a play area were included. Tradespeople arrived at night and, with impossible efficiency, constructed the entire place before morning.
By dawn, coffee machines were running, food was cooking, and customers were arriving.
Truck drivers stopped in. Walkers came through. Even squirrels seemed interested.
As far as Westall was concerned, the project was a complete success.
Then reality returned.
Back in hospital, he eagerly told his wife about the new café and asked whether people in the area were enjoying it. Her response was less enthusiastic.
There was no café.
Nothing had been built.
The woodland looked exactly as it always had.
That moment captures the strange force of ICU delirium. The dream had contained planning, decisions, work, achievement, and a finished result. It had felt productive and real. Waking up did not simply end the dream. It removed something that, for a short time, Westall believed he had actually accomplished.
There is also something revealing beneath the comedy.
At a time when he was confined to a hospital bed and dependent on others, his mind created a world in which he could still organise people, solve problems, make decisions, and build something useful.
The café was imaginary, but the desire behind it was not.
The Fentanyl Chronicles is filled with episodes like this, where serious illness and complete absurdity sit side by side. It is a memoir of intensive care, recovery, and the astonishing stories the mind can create when reality becomes uncertain.
And for one night at least, Tim Westall was not lying in a hospital bed.
He was running a very successful café.
