I Have A Dream!

Dreams...

I have the weirdest dreams. OH YES, I do!

I have always wanted to jot them down… would be a good something to read when someone’s on a trip (you know… the hallucinogen induced trips). So, here I am finally, fingers flying on the keyboard and the synapses working overtime to dig up old dreams from the archives in my brain.

I can roughly categorize my dreams in to 3 categories… violent, abstract and routine. I dream in full High Definition… in a kaleidoscope of vivid, brilliant colours. I can feel and touch in my dreams, hear and talk and even solve problems (yeah… even mathematical problems).

My violent dreams are the stuff of action movies… accidents of all possible kinds… airplanes blowing up in the air, train derailments, head-on vehicular collisions, petrol tankers / trailer trucks ramming in to houses. All this happens in HD complete with the beautiful pyrotechnics involved. Then there are the chases… car chases, chases on foot… chases through woods, through jungles, through the streets of a shanty town or the run through some ancient ruins… the hiding and evading and then the escapes. There are all sort of stunts in my dreams (but, these are stunts I might actually do if I am pushed to)… jumping from a first floor parapet, crossing over to another room over the ledge, diving in to a water body, even when I can’t swim, if it is the only way to hide from something worse than drowning… etc. Nothing too difficult, just the average adrenaline rush. As violent as my dreams are I have never had any dream in which anyone hits anyone else… no fist-fights, no maara-maari… but yeah, there have been enough shoot-outs and  armed fights.

Another favourite theme of my violent dreams are big cats… lions, tigers, leopard, panthers… and yeah, even big house cats that jump at you from the top of a cupboard. They sometimes stalk me or lay in wait along a much used path or just laze around where I stay. There is just once that I dreamt of a wolf… it died in my dream… a violent death. So, am guessing I can safely say that both felines and canines (yeah… wolves are canine and not vulpine) are represented well in my dreams.

The important part in all these dreams is that I do not die in any one of them… not because I am invincible… far from it actually (I am mostly the one being chased around)… it is just that I inevitably wake up before the killing blow / shot or before the last breath escapes!

The abstract dreams… oh! There is no easy way to describe them. I have tried to connect them to the circumstances that surround me when I am awake but that has been a futile attempt. Some of the abstract dreams are recurring with slight variations in the setting or the flow. Let me try and describe one such dream… this is a snippet of a dream that attaches itself to various other dreams I have had. This has me in a white dress… always white… the type of garment varies, sometimes it is a beautiful gown (am thinking, bridal), sometimes hospital scrubs, sometimes it is a weird sheer, flowing number… and I walk a desolate, wintry landscape… ice all around… flat as a mirror. The only other color is red… of the red blood that flows from some wound or cut on me and it leaves a trail wherever I walk. The wounds differ too… a bullet wound in the tummy, or slashes across the torso to blood seeping out the corner of my mouth (this was the latest). There is no pain… felt or imagined… and no emotion playing in my mind… only the solitary existence. Another recurring theme is something I want which can only be achieved or attained if I pass through a Crystal Maze sort of set up… highly disjointed images which flow in to each other… and I never really remember seeing the end of one. NO… I am not high on anything when I see these dreams.

My routine dreams are like an extension of my day-to-day life. Some seamlessly carry forward from where the day has ended; some lucidly paint a picture of what awaits me the next day… (I have been able to solve many a difficult question in some exams this way). Some of these dreams are like epiphanies… they sometimes give me a direction and make me understand what I have not been able to grasp when I was awake.

When I think about it… I feel my brain works so hard when I sleep that it ends up tired and dull and sleepy when I am awake!

There is a fourth category of dreams I dream… won’t be putting up a post on them… ‘Twill suffice to say they aren’t bad at all. :D