Sleeping With the Dead, Chapter One
I HAD MY first dream about the tsunami the same night I got back to my apartment in the resort town of Bang Saen. I had fallen deeply asleep, with a bit of help from the bottle of cheap Thai whisky I'd polished off, and I dreamed that at some point during the night, there was a knock at my apartment door.

When I opened it, I found some members of Ruamkatanyu, the Thai volunteer organisation I belong to, standing there. They explained that the temple in which the bodies of tsunami victims were being kept was full, and they wanted to use my room to store some corpses. Without a moment's hesitation, I said yes. It was simply my duty. I had long since lost my fear of the dead.

My colleagues carried in a couple of the long, white plastic-shrouded bundles that had become so familiar to me and laid them in my room. In the dream, they returned again and again, bringing more bodies each time.

I can't remember how often they came, but I do remember worrying that my room was getting full. By the time they left me in peace, there were around 12 or 13 bodies crowding the floor.

I awoke in the morning, sweating, my mouth furry and disgusting, my head pounding. I lay there for a while and stared up at my ceiling, summoning the courage to move and at the same time trying very hard not to think about whisky.

Then I suddenly remembered my dream. I lifted my head to look at the floor, and part of me was actually surprised I didn't see bodies there. It's funny: while I knew it was a dream, I still needed to confirm it with my own eyes.

Sure enough, there was just my tiled floor, in need of a bit of a sweep, but otherwise clear.

After some time, I heaved my protesting body out of bed and stumbled in the general direction of the toilet. As I blearily rounded the corner, I got a bit of a shock. My front door was wide open.

Outside, the corridor was sprinkled with fine, white sand, and in the sand were the unmistakable outlines of the prints of bare feet, of many shapes and sizes.

I don't believe in ghosts. I used to be a sleepwalker when I was a kid, and it's happened a few times since I've been an adult, when I've been worse for wear from drink. I presume that, in my drunken state, I must have sleepwalked to the door and left it open.

People returning from a stroll on the beach must have peeked in to have a squiz at the drunken, snoring farang.

That's my perfectly rational, farang explanation for it. But when I tell Thai friends this story, they shrug and offer a perfectly simple explanation of their own from Thai culture.

The ghosts of people whose lives had been cut short by the tsunami had become trapped in our world and found themselves unable to find their way home. They had seen me taking care of the dead and had decided to follow me to ask for my help.

And because I had opened my door to them that night in my dream, I had let the ghosts into my room and, by implication, into my life.

My friends had no doubt that I now had a dozen or so ghosts of tsunami victims following me around. Yeah, right, I answered. For how long? The rest of your life, they said.

To be freed from them, I would have to go back to Wat Bang Muang in Phang-Na province, the temple-turned-mortuary where I had worked in the aftermath of the disaster. I would need to ask the monk there to perform a ceremony to separate the ghosts from me and release them from this earth.

I never did it, because I don't believe in ghosts. My Thai friends unanimously believe I still sleep with the dead in spirit, just as I had actually slept in the company of corpses in the refrigerated containers in the tsunami-stricken region of southern Thailand.

Some of them won't go to sleep in the same room as me, because while they have no objection to sharing a room with me, they're not so keen on sleeping with a bunch of ghosts.

That was the first dream. Others followed. One night, I woke up convinced someone or something had been trying to strangle me. I sat up gasping and holding my throat as if something had just been squeezing it with strong, icy fingers. This time, there was no sense that it had been a dream. It felt as though it had really happened, and I was a little freaked out by it.

Googling and asking around, I discovered a rational explanation for this one, too. Apparently, dreams of drowning or choking are common among people experiencing stress. That was surely the answer.

Still, it gives me a bit of a chill whenever I think about it. It was amazingly real. Occasionally, I dreamed I was searching for the dead. I knew they were waiting for me, and I had to find them.

In one dream, I was searching the seabed for them, pulling bodies free of the silt and bringing them up to the surface. I knew they were happy once I had found them, so I dived again and again, without any air tanks, just holding my breath.

This dream, too, ended with me waking gasping for breath, as if I'd just been deep underwater.

Curiously, a week after one of these dreams, a Japanese friend, Koju, invited me to go back down to Khao Lak in Southern Thailand with a bunch of fellow divers. His group believed there was an area of seabed that might contain the remains of many victims of the tsunami, and they intended diving for them.

I wanted to go - perhaps because I vividly remembered the gratitude I sensed from the dead as I recovered them in the dream - but unfortunately it was impossible because of work commitments.

A lot of my dreams at that time involved choking or gasping for air. Maybe it has something to do with the way many people died in the tsunami. That's not a subject I've dwelt on, but on the other hand, I couldn't help imagining their awful fate as I handled the corpses. At any rate, slowly over the months and years since the 2004 disaster, the dreams have faded and become fewer.

Bang Saen, 85 km south of Bangkok, is a pretty spot, with a beautiful beach and a gorgeous, palm-fringed waterfront. It's the kind of place tourists seek out. But life there began to pall for me after my return from the tsunami. I think, looking back, that every day I looked out my windows at the sea I thought of the tsunami and things best forgotten.

Every time I saw a loaded-up plastic rubbish bag slumped on the footpath, I thought about the body bags full of putrid human remains - bones, maggots and fluids sloshing around. Soon after my return, I saw a woman cooking wearing plastic gloves. It took me a few moments to realise that I was just standing there, staring at her gloves. I was seeing my own gloves, covered in human offal and writhing maggots.

I saw dogs playing in the street, and remembered the child's corpse that dogs had dragged out of our makeshift morgue and mutilated. There were reminders everywhere.

Perhaps I was haunted, after all. Despite all the horror, I found myself thinking in strange and alarming ways. My boots still stank of the bodies, but I couldn't seem to throw them away. In fact - and I know it sounds sick and crazy - I sometimes found myself longing to smell that smell again.

I actually found myself feeling nostalgic for the carnage; somehow dissatisfied with everyday life in contrast to the extraordinary things I had done in the aftermath of the disaster. I wanted to keep on collecting the dead forever.

It took a while before I was able to confide this feeling to others. I was both confused and scared by it, and it took some courage to own up to something that I thought must sound weird and shameful. But amazingly, many of the others who worked among the remains of the tsunami victims felt exactly the same.

I found I missed everyone I worked with intensely, because no one else seemed to understand what I was going through.

My friend Koju, who worked with me at Khao Lak in Phang-Na, called two days after I got back and asked whether I wanted to meet up for a drink. Sure, I said. He drove all the way out from Bangkok. As we drank, he told me his girlfriend just couldn't seem to understand his feelings about the tsunami.

I knew exactly what he meant. I was on a roller-coaster of emotions myself. By the time I left the disaster area, I was pretty much numb to the tragedy itself, to the horrible death of all those thousands of people and to the suffering of their loved ones.

And yet, I also felt a sense of deep personal loss. This ashamed me, because I hadn't lost anyone in the tsunami. I was alive, and so was everyone I loved. What right did I have to feel so bad about what had happened? It proved impossible to communicate this strange set of feelings to people who weren't there.

Most people were getting on with their lives, and dealt with my need to talk about it by trying to make out like nothing had happened. Within days, there were even a few who were trying to joke about it. I usually smiled at their efforts to be polite, but I guarded my own emotions jealously. Until I was with other workers, that is: then we could talk about it - or not talk about it - knowing that everyone was feeling the same way.

I suppose that's why I didn't need much persuading when my friends and fellow Ruamkatanyu volunteers, X (that's really his name!) and James, asked me to join Kanti 7, their ambulance unit back in Bangkok.

The idea of working with the living after working with so much death appealed to me. At least working as an ambulance officer I had the chance to save lives, rather than just collect dead bodies.

I handed in my notice at work and packed myself off to Bangkok. I found soon that, in the wake of the tsunami, everything had changed there, too. Prior to the disaster, I never felt that I was truly part of the group. In my first few years in Thailand and in Ruamkatanyu, I felt that my place was as a token farang, a mascot of sorts whom it amused them to parade around at events. My white skin, my height - I'm 190 centimetres, compared with most Thais, who stand about 170 centimetres when they're really stretching - mean that I must have seemed pretty alien to my colleagues.

I was, after all, the first farang ever to be a part of this group. I always found myself trying to work harder than everyone else and doing my best to impress them in an effort to gain their acceptance, but I never felt it had really worked.

Even Pi Paeng and Pi Lek, the organisers of Ruamkatanyu and the parents of the university student I taught in my early years in Thailand, seemed to feel no more than a kind of formal affection for me - more out of the traditional Thai respect for my role as a teacher, and in particular a teacher of their child, than anything more personal.

But all that was before the tsunami. The passing of time probably also had something to do with it, but after the tsunami, their affection seemed to have deepened to something much closer to genuine parental love. A year after the tsunami, Pi Paeng solemnly presented me with a 500-year-old necklace of the Buddha that I had often seen him wearing.

His expression indicated that this was a significant gift: everyone I subsequently spoke to was quite amazed, confirming that this was not the kind of gift you give on a whim.

I remember one day following the tsunami at the Bang Muang temple, a Thai official walked past me and said to my boss: ''Does Ruamkatanyu have a farang working for it?''

From behind him, a very young volunteer piped up and said: ''He is not a farang. He is Marko.''

There was a slight pause as everyone thought about this. Then people began to laugh, and any tension over the volunteer's insolence was forgotten. As we all stood there, I tried to catch the eye of the boy who'd said it. It meant a lot to me, far more than he could have guessed.

As I said, soon after the tsunami, I finally felt that I was fully accepted as one of the guys by my Ruamkatanyu colleagues. Perhaps it was because I was genuinely useful in the two weeks I spent working in the disaster zone: quite apart from the routine clean-up work, I could do things that they couldn't, such as liaise with foreign embassy officials, farang families and the foreign media. I went from being a mascot to being an asset.

After that, every time I was introduced, it was as ''Marko, who worked with us at the tsunami''. A few months later, all the workers who had helped in the awful clean-up received a medal from the Thai government.

I was the only foreigner to receive this medal and, again, the government representative who gave it to me was surprised and impressed that a farang worked for Ruamkatanyu - just as my fellow volunteers seemed proud that I was part of the organisation. I really felt I belonged. I was now one of them. I had finished my long stay in Thailand, and started my life there.

I gave the Thai government's medal, along with the Service Medal I received from the New Zealand government at a ceremony presided over by the New Zealand ambassador in 2008, to my parents.

Both medals sit on their Upper Hutt mantelpiece, a couple of handy conversation pieces whenever anyone asks after their Marko and what he's doing with himself these days. I think of the medals as a kind of consolation prize for my parents, in lieu of a son who will probably never return home.

My home now is in Thailand.

Extract from 'Sleeping With the Dead: A Kiwi Working With Bangkok's Bodysnatchers' by Marko Cunningham

Published by Random House New Zealand, September 18. Available for purchase online at: www.fishpond.co.nz

Visit Marko's own site at bkkfreeambulance.com

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