Dream Diary

My dreams weave in and out of train stations, crossing perilous oceans on un-navigated ships- always an anxious waiting for arrival, never reaching- promises of fabulous cities drifting away in meandering mazes or wrecked vessels, like that omnipresent thirst as cups of tea become as elusive of the alchemist’s secret formula cooked in holy chalices and old faces masking mine warble incoherent delirium that I cannot translate though they always speak languages I know in my dreams. And I wake from dreams where I am a drifting castaway in an island being dug all over by an army of automaton Man Fridays for treasure far more potent than Defoe could have imagined, the treasure forever slipping my grasp, with only a lingering sense of terror that I carry over to my Duolingo lessons.

Je suis une femme. La pomme es rouge.

There is such comfort in the familiar stability of these words. It is easy to learn a language as a child, for the child’s world is still whole and solid and untainted by the bleeding away of colours.

There was this other dream I had where I skipped frequencies and arrived in a different reality, a world that was same and different, and I was the only one who remembered that other reality that had been wiped away, leaving me in a constant torment of comparison. And may be that is why we haven’t harnessed quantum-leaping, because we’re afraid not of failing, but of succeeding. Succeeding, and not forgetting, without a way back.

Days and nights and long winded conversations through tube rail journeys skittered down to the occasional texts and memes and videos and emoji boards designed to hide the lack of things to say. But maybe those round yellow faces are honest. Maybe they really do express something truly felt, for feelings are easier than words that need to be articulated and weighed and run through eight hundred million billion possible scenarios of consequences of different inflections and the wrong stresses and perhaps a there was a yellow kite in the sky when you spoke them or a deranged, lone-wolf with a gun was gazing at violets in the fields but what if a stray shot hits and the words are left hanging, never to be completed, never to be understood. Have you thought of that? It is far easier, here and now, with these comfortable predictability of these cartoon faces- a face blissfully oblivious, a face eager for new experiences, a face outraged by mock-rejections. ROFL, LMAO, LOL! What a cool meme!

Love couldn’t change all the stars or all the lines on the palm meeting and crossing and running in frenzied directions, but it could perhaps bring a little rest, a quiet joy of being oneself, effortless. Why do I say this? If I knew, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I suppose there’s an off-chance, for I don’t quite remember, that amidst the dreams of vampires and corpses sprouting alien tentacles from their mouths, classrooms blending into libraries and missed trains and rickety bridges that disappear, there might be an answer somewhere. Something that makes sense. But the desire for love isn’t ambition or narcissism or even lust, or perhaps not only these things but also a hope for alignment of souls so one can align with oneself. And as a lifetime goal, that isn’t wrong to ask for, or too much to endeavor to create. We create our realities.

Dreams slip away in morning light long before the slumberous wrappings of your mind, leaving behind the barest hint of colours and answers. And so we jump from one story to another, obsessing over endgames that we can’t find in our own lives. Taking each story, wanting only to finish it, hoping for contentment when we reach the end- but the end only brings an aching hollow, a vacuum, a blank space that you don’t know how to fill. And so we stumble onwards to the next story, and then the next, and then the next. The other way of staying sane is to hold on to a few ‘truths’ that remain even when the world burns down and your house burns down and everybody you know burns screaming, pleading, begging while you stand with your fiery brand against the onslaught of the crashing universe with its myriad disagreements and untruths. And you stay there, in your little musty cocoon, knowing you are safe, knowing your place in the story. And you know how it ends. And you alone are going to heaven.

 Take a railway station. Not a big, busy one but one of those lonely small town stations with narrow platforms that the sun stretches over at noon when the newspaper sellers and the tea-stall man and the office-goers have all gone to busier destinations and the station just waits there, a gulmohar tree with its green branches standing still in the absence of wind and wings. There’s no digital display board, no announcements over the loudspeaker, creating an illusion of stilled Time in a bell jar. The lone man at the ticket counter begins dozing off into broken dreams of tinkling coins and galloping trains that don’t stop at small-town stations- important trains with new paintjobs carrying important people and their stories to important places. There are so many stories we never learn- the trains that pass, the stops we leave behind. And you’re the only one waiting, for a train that will finally stop for you, to take you somewhere, to give you direction and purpose.  But those seconds on that unshaded platform- moments of enforced inaction or deliberate passivity begin under the hazy sun to form a shape of life, a fragile form soon to be dissipated by the arrival of your train at last- and you’ve moved away, pulled away, focusing intensely on navigating your way through the crowd blocking your way, finding a seat, beginning to tick off your to-do-list once you arrive at your destination and the vague shape of your meditations remain forgotten on that platform.

Hi, there, everyone. I know I have been neglecting this blog of late, but I have been insanely busy with a high-profile seminar at the college where I teach (Is that a gasp I hear? Don't worry, I speak more coherently in my class than I do here on my blog. At least I hope I do. I'll ask my students.) and several deadlines and so on and so forth. I mean, I am only on the second day of my vacation and I have already submitted a paper and typed out the key for a question paper. What is wrong with me? But anyway, thank you for sticking on and for reading this, even if it read like disjointed pieces of stream-of-consciousness (which is exactly what it was, by the way).
Meanwhile, as I keep reminding you, you can keep up with me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. If you like my posts or my poems or my videos, please do like, share and subscribe. And feel free to comment because internet artists like us survive on your support. So thanks once again for being here.
I'll hopefully see you next week here with a surprise, but before I go, I was really sad about Avengers 4 being the last film for Captain America, so I wrote a little poem I'll leave here as a tribute.