Have we been faking ourselves with the dogma of ‘reality’? Have we created barriers of possibilities with our woven garb of rationality and moral conduct? If not so, then how do we define whatever takes place in our dreams? We are still homo sapiens sleeping amid the same society as we dream. The only difference is that we have our conscious state of mind asleep that time. And events take place in that span of time (time which doesn’t follow the hands of our clock) that allow so many things we dare not imagine with a manipulated hypothalamus.
There was a night I dreamt about a man in a huge black robe who carried a plastic bag full of dead elf-babies and convinced me this would be the last scene to flash in front of my eyes before leaving my vital body.
It was a misty morning. I could see him from atop a hill. He had many spectators. It was as if a big show in town was on. An open air theatre. An audience in woollen clothes had gathered in the hilltop gallery. The man wore a scar of death. He appeared calm and mistakenly cruel like Snape. Who was that man? Whose were those blue infants? They all surely had addresses. So what if they could not be located with GIS — they certainly existed. I met them. Perhaps they cannot be found after I woke up, but that can never rule out their existence. Perhaps they were sublime beings. Or maybe they all exist somewhere ‘between’ time which we have failed to theorise as yet. And about the other audience — they might be the disconnected mortal beings of this known planet who had the same dream as mine that night.
That afternoon I did kiss the teacher whose traces weren’t even in my farthest fantasies. But I enjoyed myself in the dream. My sphincter muscles did squeeze when our skins met. I bogarted my side pillow for long after I woke up, recapitulating his breath which seemed so vivid. I was being drawn towards this man for that moment for whom I had had no butterflies so far. Yet I clung to my pillow tight at the thought of that exotic kiss. Which kiss? Was it real? Of course it was. My skin touched his. I could pattern the rhythm of his breath. It all happened. There was an uninhibited attraction and there was that kiss. He had come over walking into my dream in that mysterious hour which he could never call up later on. Let’s say he was made to forget about it and I was the lucky chap who could cherish the secret moment. But I believe the kiss happened. I did kiss him in ‘reality’. There was no dearth of anything except his awareness about it after the dream ceased. But that didn’t matter. What matters is that I believe in my dreams. I also realise that perhaps unknowingly I’d been drawn towards this entity and so my subconscious chose that night to travel me to the obscure time of the day called ‘dream time’. Had I been morally awake I wouldn’t have dared to venture into such a scene. But dream is outside the periphery of such constitution.
I believe in resurrection with a probability of unity because I can see my Nani all merry and fussy even after she has metamorphosed into ashes last December. I can again hug her, play with the lax skin around her arms, smell the old woman, the medicines and the doctor’s oil in her, I can irritate her — all I ever did when I visited her. But using a past tense here would be being ignorant to my visits that my dream still pays. A touch of affection is what constitutes the base of our defined ‘reality’ and if I am sure I have felt her touch and have rejoiced hugging her in my dreams then I could well conclude that I did meet her in real and shall again, if the subconscious so arranges.
Maybe I am not qualified enough to be a NASA scientist by degree but that never hindered my seeing the moon up close as a giant from the terrace. A big silver sphere, radiating specks of white-shine that started melting. And I was the fortunate one to pocket the melted moon as a treasure. I was in love with the moon ever since my senses were born. I wanted to possess the vast inanimate. And one night it did happen. I was anxiously praying for the other scientists to be late enough to reach my terrace so that I could entrap it entirely in my tiny hands. Molten though, I knew I could again solidify it into the giant ball and keep it on my terrace, sit back, smoke a joint, and be impinged into a trance. I could be imperative about its position in the sky. The magnificent moon was mine for that frenzied night.
My cells still perform metabolism and keep me as fit as a fiddle but this has never contradicted my experiencing a bullet shot. The intimidating Chinese gang had fired a gunshot right on my forehead after they were tasked to do so as written on that paper chit. I remember their eyes. So stoic. So professional. They neatly took out the gun when their turn came and shot me deftly. I had experienced what it felt like to know that your life is about to end. I was numb. Too frozen to be sad. I remember only panicking. I was sending prayers to god at a speed faster than light for them to procrastinate. I wanted to live more. More than I was anticipating the bullet that would burn through my flesh I was immersed in thoughts of how eventful a human life was and how I would be deprived of it after a few seconds. I was ready to pay everything even to live the saddest minutes from life. They were at least alive. I woke up from the dream sweltering like a chased prey. And then the rest of the day flew in its normal course. But I now know about the moment before a murder and how a bullet feels like on the very second it has just been fired out of the gun and touched your skin.
There was no such representation of that land in the atlas, neither did it appear as a lost land headline in the newspaper. But I have travelled there. Without tickets. Without transport. I’d apparated there via a dream. It was an endless field of soft green. An amusement park was to be noticed some miles down. I slid through the roller coaster of cloudride, climbed up a whirlpool of staircases and came down at the face of the entrance gate of a sanctuary. In that sanctuary were all animix — some I’d seen in Cartoon Network and some I’d never seen in conscious brain. Subconscious should’ve been awarded for such genetic engineering. But the mass would laugh them away just as some stupid dream. To them dreams were crazy, just a blend of unattended memory films. But I believe them to be true. Reality is nothing isolated, it is just an outcome of our beliefs. How can I possibly discard anything as not being a part of the real world when I have sensed it through my afferent nerves? When it has evoked an emotion no less than the alert hours, or perhaps even more than that?
Dreams do not toe on lines drawn by social laws and scientific theories. They are of a vast domain. They are fearless. Their identities are sealed at the pleasure of the dreamer. They dig deep into the black hole of truths that have been swayed away even before being reflected upon. It’s funny and unfair, too, that my result of that awaited examination came out in so many colours every night I dreamt about it, yet people accepted only one aggregate. It’s exciting that I made out with that girl whom I didn’t even need to befriend — I’d first hypnotised and then invited her into my dream where I caressed her slender waist. It’s a satisfaction that I could shout my lungs out at my uncle who had tried to mess with my puberty, yet I didn’t need to be the host of embarrassment. It’s a jackpot that I could trip to Blyton’s magic faraway lands despite knowing that the only destination of the day was Sealdah. Dream defies our knowledge of the world we have created. Dream is the space that dares to transcend the laws of gravitation, where demand dares to be independent of your purchasing power, where your memory pours every super-fraction it registers. There is more to existence than the destiny of awakened hours. Only God, who has the power to expand and contract time, has gifted us with the power to dream — which is a ticket to wonderland! If you choose to be convinced that dreams are real events, you are the gainer! The gainer of a huge prize, huger than the spheroid you see around with open eyes.
Remember, you dream in these earthly hours themselves. Remember you have actually lived each moment of all your dreams.
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