Sunday, February 26, 2012

A dreamy affair

I knew not what I was staring it. It was hazy all around. I sensed a movement. Then I saw it. No, him. Like a snake slithering, a man appeared. He was wearing a white chef hat with strange flower carvings. I had not seen him before, yet I didn't sense any foreboding. He handed me a card without any preamble. There were some kind of symbols drawn on both sides of the card. Seeing me perplexed, the man told me where I was to find my friend and the route I had to take. Insisting that I keep the card safely, he disappeared as he had arrived.

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Leo was getting impatient. His friend hadn't turned up yet. Having traveled far, he didn't want to miss the air show which was about to begin anytime. He flipped through the pamphlet yet again to keep his cool. After an agonizing wait, he felt a tap on his right shoulder. He turned about. No one was near. As is the wont of human impulse, he turned left now. His friend's apologetic face stared back at him. Leo thought of swearing, but held back. Let the show get over, he thought. After all his friend had the tickets.

The two friends were moving towards the gates when they heard the unmistakeable whirring of plane overhead. Both of them turned around and looked above to catch a glimpse. They were waiting for the plane to perform some trick when Leo's friend noticed another plane coming in view below the one they were watching. He was about to bring Leo's attention to it, when it happened. The second plane moved too fast, too low and something else was strange. The plane looked like a fighter plane but painted in such assorted colors as a child would draw a cartoon. And the plane behaved as if a cartoon. It was not only moving quickly, but staggered up and down as if made of rubber. The two friends stood transfixed on the spot as the plane perilously stooped towards them and flew away. No one else seemed to have seen it as most of them were still gazing at the first plane doing its trick.

Leo twitched as if to speak when he noticed the rubbery plane making a U-turn and coming back to them. Before the two could take a step though, the plane had already landed. The pointed tip on the front of the plane pierced Leo's friend, injuring him fatally.

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Meanwhile, somewhere else, two people were watching the events from the live feed of the rubbery plane. They had waited a long time for this day and everything had gone awry. The shorter of the two was about to switch off the feed when the taller one shouted "Wait a minute, it can't be happening. Is that his soul? No, no, no. It's another of me!". He closed his eyes for a while, deep in thought. "It can have only one explanation, only one explanation it can be. His clothes and card are a confirmation", the taller said coming out of his reverie.

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I was walking towards the destination the man had given. The lonely roads seemed familiar, yet I couldn't place it when I had been before. I kept turning the card in my hands to no avail. The symbols seemed randomly drawn. I had a strange feeling that the symbols were different from when I had seen it first. But I had no way of knowing as the random pattern was hard to remember anyway. Lost in thought, I failed to notice the dramatic change of landscape. Suddenly there were people all around. There was sunshine when it was foggy only a moment ago. As my eyes adjusted, I saw myself standing near a dead body.

Both Leo and I had lots of questions and confusions strangling us. Here I was staring at my own dead body while Leo was staring at himself in the cockpit of the strange plane. The crowd however continued to be oblivious of everything happening to us and we seemed to have been wrapped around with infinite nothingness.

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The other Leo ignored the dead me and took the two of us in his cartoon-like plane across weird mountains having tall trees atop with branches on either side bending all the way to ground level. Along the way we had dozed off and when we awoke, the day just got weirder. There were two more of us.

"Welcome to the 3rd dimension of the universe", intoned the third me, towering over the third Leo.
Continuing with the slightly irritating musical tone, he added "It was a failure, the mission today, huge failure it was". He closed his eyes and shook his head a few times.
"Okay, I will try to make sense in explaining what happened today. First of all, this is a dream for you, Sundeep from the first dimension. The card you got is one of the ways to jump into another dimension. The pilot Leo who brought you both is from the fourth dimension. His rubbery plane is another of the ways of hopping dimensions. Your arrival into second dimension was unexpected and perhaps caused the accident leading to the death of your body in that dimension. As such, I don't expect it to cause any discomfort in your dimension. Because, as you see, there are infinite dimensions making up the waking universe that you know. Like the fundamental sine wave, it takes infinite components in one domain to create a single component in another domain. How we named the dimensions or what we intended to do today is irrelevant for you. And you probably would forget most of the details anyway. All I want is for you to remember this dream, so that when you meet us again, you won't be shocked and surrounded by a shield preventing you from speaking as you both would have noticed today. Strange are these dreams, stranger still that dream and reality met in different dimensions."

Me and Leo continued to have the dazed look, the pilot Leo and other two resorting to animated discussions. All I remember of what happened next was a resounding echo of pilot Leo's rubbery plane taking off.

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-Based on a true incident, I mean a true dream :D
Like the never ending search for meaning of life, I find interpreting dreams interesting. Most striking feature is that there is no dream without ourselves as a character in it. And most of the other characters/locations are mostly from our  known ones but jumbled up in weird ways. Is that a reflection of how our sub-conscious mind perceives our daily experiences or random events plucked and stitched together? But I tend to disagree if someone says that dreams are meaningless. Many a times dreams have helped me in solving real life problems or find a loop-hole in something I worked earlier in the day. Or sometimes when I wake up from sleep, be it morning or middle of night, I find myself thinking about the previous day's work from a new perspective and infer a lot which otherwise in the day I couldn't think of.

So, have you had any such dreams trying to convey something? Do leave it in comments, I would love to read them :)