Meet you on the other side
There is a world out there that remains untapped by everybody else. Once I am inside, anything is possible. Calling it beautiful would be an understatement. It’s a place ruled by none except my imagination and the resulting confusion. Poets have named it Dreamland but if you were to ask me — given my vivid memory of some of my experiences with my eyes tight shut — it’s worth wondering what is really real?
Sharing a few of the many episodes for your entertainment.
Like I’ve mentioned before, Netflix is not a patch on the content available in my dreams. If only I could record everything.
EPISODE 1
We are playing chess. You and me. I am not adept at offline chess. So damn used to moving pieces on the screen of my phone/laptop. However, we are in the middle part of our game and I notice that you’ve made an illegal move. I want to interrupt and say something but I don’t. I make my move and the game carries on. However, in the back of my head, I am angry because I can’t let go off the fact that we aren’t playing this game in the true spirit. Even if I win, it’d be stained. If I lose, I’d be doubly defeated. I don’t know what happened in the end but I remember looking at that evil tiny smile plastered at the edge of your face throughout.
EPISODE 2
Some dreams feel so long. Like an Andrei Tarkovsky movie, without the finesse. It just drags on and on and you wake up tired. But at that moment, seated on the edge of the bed, you don’t realize what all you’ve gone through in your dreams that left you so fatigued. In one such dream, you weren’t happy about something and my mission was to understand what made you so pissed at me. We were on a nice street straight out of Lorde’s music videos and I was walking behind you. My aim was to keep pace with you. Although I had no idea what I did or said, I just wanted you to know that I am sorry. But you kept walking. At last, at one point, I held your arm, to stop you from walking away, and that’s when you turned around and said, peering straight into my eyes, “Ek baar dil toot jaayein toh phir uska kuch nahi ho sakta.” That’s when I let you go as you disappeared into the street. Even in my dreams, I was thinking, “Yeh line achhi tweet ban sakti hai.”
EPISODE 3
The greatest power you have over others is they can’t stop you from thinking about them. The second greatest power is your ability to invite people into your dreams. My Dreamland requires no visa. I’ve had the likes of Tom Cruise, Jane Goodall and Hitler speak to me in Tulu. Not very long ago, I used to see Natalie Portman doing Natalie Portman-ish things after I’ve fallen asleep. Amazingly enough, she was always nice to me in my dreams. Similarly, as a young boy, I was obsessed with Asha Parekh — my dad was a huge fan too — and often saw her in my dreams. In most of them, she was my class teacher and I used to do everything possible to be in her good books. In one such boyish dream, I accidentally dropped ink on her sari and she slapped me so hard that I never dreamt of her again.
EPISODE 4
We are in Iceland. There are no people around us. Hardly any trees either. The weather is pleasant and we are seemingly lost. I check my phone — it’s a Vivo phone; I don’t even use a Vivo but in my dreams, I always have a Vivo phone — only gods know why — and there is no signal. It’s clear to me that we are lost and need help going back wherever we were stationed earlier. But you appear oblivious to these existential realities and are in the moment. Like a kid in the park who has ultimately escaped lockdown. I look up at the sky, trying to locate the sun but it’s difficult to figure out the time. Maybe it’s past noon. I am trying to be in the moment with you but I am already scared to face sunset. What will we do then? My trivia-addled mind tells me that there aren’t a lot of wild animals to worry about in Iceland. But then, what about food? I look at your face and you tell me, in your soft voice, that you are grateful for us. I want to shake you up and fill you in on the problems we might be having if we don’t get back to our lodging on time but I don’t. Perhaps I was grateful for us too.
EPISODE 5
Some of our recurring dreams are the only vestiges left from our childhood. They are there to remind us that we might have abandoned our past but our past hasn’t given up on us yet. As a kid, I loved airplanes and thought I will be a pilot someday. The closest I got to an aircraft was spotting it in the sky and competing with the neighbourhood kids in waving at it. If I spot first, I get the right to wave at it first. As my adulthood would have it, I visited an airport for the first time at the age of 26. Quite an experience. However, one dream has continued to this day. It featured me flying an airplane over the city and looking down upon tiny people below — presumably my childhood friends I competed with — and flying over the Arabian Sea. As I plan to descend, I always ended up tangled in the electric power lines.
EPISODE 6
If you consider yourself a human, then you must have experienced that dream where you’ve missed a step on the ladder or miscalculated the stairs and end up jerking your knee. That template has been misused by my subconsciousness to such an extent that one glaring glitch-in-the-matrix dream happened some years ago. It was me falling down the stairs and the steps won’t end. Like an infinite loop. I am falling and falling and falling and even in that chaotic state of mind, I thought of what that old Indian woman said to Bertrand Russell: “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
EPISODE 7
There was a wonderful poem in Class 7 about a man named Colonel Fazackerley who lived in an old house. A ghost tries to scare him off but he turns the table by being amused by its antics. The lesson imparted, hopefully, was that we mustn’t let our preconceived notions of fear defeat us. Instead, we must rely on our sense of humour to guide us through our helpless moments. Keeping this in mind, in quite a lot of my dreams, I’ve tried to laugh at ghosts. For some reasons, most of these ghosts were women with eyes sans eyelids. Always staring and always grumbling. In one unforgettable dream, a ghost charged at me and much against my instincts, I stood my ground and smiled at her. She stopped about a foot away from my face and instantly vanished. I was perfectly fine until that moment. Ironic as it is, when she disappeared, I was scared as fuck and woke up with sweat beads on my forehead. In another instance, I woke up with my leg stretched out in kung fu style. Why? Because in my dream, I was trying to stop someone from charging into me but as it turns out that person was a spirit and he passed through me — leaving me baffled in my dreams and Ninja-like in my bed.
EPISODE 8
During my school days, I harboured a 6-year long silent crush on a classmate. It was only after I moved north to Gurgaon that I stopped seeing her pretty face in my dreams. My favourite one was directed by Richard Linklater and showed us in a school picnic and we are playing on a see-saw. The only problem was we were both quite grown-ups for doing that.
EPISODE 9
I saw my ajji (maternal grandma) in my dreams before the morning she passed away. Amma woke us up hurriedly to inform us that she will have to leave immediately for our village. Later, for the longest time, particularly during my hostel days, I used to see my ajji talk to me in her typical style: palming my face with one hand and patting my back with another. When somebody dies, people generally say the sweetest stuff about them. But a true test of character is when people aren’t able to say anything bad about a person even after years of passage. In my dreams, she always said the right things. Maybe because she always did the right things.
EPISODE 10
I recently started riding motorbikes after a gap of over 10 years. In my dream, I am riding a Bullet and you were on the pillion seat. For support, you had lightly held my right shoulder. Your white dupatta kept flying in my face and it was quite frustrating; not because of the dupatta but because you were telling me something but I couldn’t hear and kept asking you to repeat. I could have stopped the bike but I thought I shouldn’t as the road was scenic, with trees on both sides and by the end of it, we didn’t have a conversation. True to our legacy, either you say something I don’t hear or I say something you don’t listen to.
EPISODE 11
I avoid confrontation as it’s mostly hinged to our ego and I don’t wish to participate in anything that would make me feel like more or less inhumane. That said, in my dreams, I am an avid debater. In one of my most stirring debates, I was arguing against patriarchy and the role organized religions continue to play in keeping women pressed under the ceiling. Nothing can back you up like facts but at the same time, nothing can break you down like sentiments. The person I was debating with started weeping and I was standing clueless what to do next. I tried to reach out and console by saying that it’s just a friendly chat. She wouldn’t have any of it and said I can’t see her anymore in my dreams. To which, all I could muster with a straight face was, “Who are you to decide that I shouldn’t see you in my dreams?”
EPISODE 12
My brother is on his way to earning a PhD for sure. Give or take, a few years. Not surprising given his depth in political science and urban studies. So, as are our discussions in the real world, my dreamy conversations with him reek of rectitude and accuracy. In a recent dream, we were in the UN hall of all places and he was about to deliver a speech on the necessity of embracing infrastructure and design together. What’s the point in building structures that are eyesores? Mukesh Ambani knows what we are referring to here. As he reaches the podium, and I could see the green bathroom tiles behind him, I was getting ready to Instagram the shit out of this speech. Wait a minute, there is disturbance in the audience. I look sideways and notice that a cow has entered the room. Some are laughing while others are scared of her pointy horns. My brother stands there transfixed, not uttering a word. If I had been in his place, I would have screamed out loud and clear — “This is what happens when you don’t combine infrastructure with design. Who the fuck designed this Lego building?”
EPISODE 13
You were the owner of a house that my friend was staying at as a tenant and you loved humming. So throughout the dream, I could hear you hum. It was partly amusing and partly annoying. Amusing because it was nice to hear something from you. Annoying because I couldn’t guess the song you were humming. I hate it when that happens. Anyway, I was trying to tell my friend that I know you but he wouldn’t believe me. There was no proof anyway. Khwaabon mein kaaagaz kaisey dikhainge?
EPISODE 14
Last night, I saw this dream where we were on a serious mission. Believe it or not, we were trying to find a bomb. Yes, you read that right. The only way we could locate is by sourcing the beeping noise. We were running here and there trying to figure out where the bomb was. At one point, we thought it was hidden in the toilet flush. But no luck whatsoever. We spent the entire dream without any success. When I woke up, Vivek’s snoozed alarm was ringing as usual.
