A Dream Sleep

Diary entry: Sunday, Jan 27th 2013

Have you ever been so tired that you were dreaming that you were sleeping? I am still a little disoriented. You'd be too if you were jolted up from 2 sleeps. I am still not sure if I am up or in another dream.

We were returning home from a family trip. Dad was driving my Galant. I was tired, half asleep in the back seat.I vaguely remember my dad pulling into a driveway and parking on a grass field. My dad took his luggage from the trunk, walked up a flight of stairs, unlocked the door and walked in. A few lights turned on and my attention was back around me inside the car. Mom had now got hold of the wheel and my brother had jumped into the passenger seat before I could even respond; not sure where we were going. I didn't care. I just wanted to sleep. I sprawled on my back in the backseat and closed my eyes.

I am on a bed on a grass field. How I got there, I don't know. It doesn't matter either. The stars are bright; a cool breeze is in the air. I feel peaceful, almost refreshed.

"Wake up, we are home", I heard a call.

I still feel tired. I turn over and check the clock in my phone; 7:06. I am late. I have to pick my friend up in 20 minutes and go skiing. I'll drive to his place and then let him take the wheels. In the meantime, I should write about this; I haven't blogged in months, I think as I jump off the bed and rush to the washroom.

Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 4

... Contd. from “Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 3” ... If you want to see a dream again but this time control it to your liking, then go to sleep thinking about the dream along with a rough alternate storyline based on what you wish to see.

Now, I wanted to try that out asap. I thought of shooting and killing the whale, as I slowly drifted into the subconscious...

A deep fear fills me as I stand over an edge and look down the steep slope. I can’t ski down that. Yes, It’s not that far down, but I can’t go further with the skis on. What if I hurt myself? I can hardly do a “Green” slope without falling over even once. Should I find another way down? I turn left to look at the map and I see Bharath (a friend from NITC) coming down the slope behind me.

He jumps over the steep section but lands awkwardly. He loses balance as he falls over. He tumbles over the slope and finally rests face down just a couple of feet away from the edge of the cliff. He’s not moving. I can’t go down there to see if he is ok. I panic. I need to get help.

Out of the blue, my brother, on a snowboard, comes down over my left shoulder, negotiates the slope with ease and stops near Bharath like a pro. I shout out to him, “Call the paramedics. I will see if I can get help from up here.” (Apologies Bharath, if you are reading this. I don’t know if my subconscious wanted to hurt you or help you. No offense, please.)

I run off towards a hole in the wall on my left. As I go through, I hear the paramedics saying something. I only catch the words, “vision”, “problem”, “ glasses” and “power 2.5”. I reach the other side of the wall. I am on a corridor. It looks like the one in C-Hostel, NITC, the one near my old room (C-124). I reach the new section of the hostel and go towards the first open room. There are people inside. I shout out for help. Many people come out. I recognize Johnu and Dileep. I am trying to say something but it seems like they can’t hear me, or is it that they don’t care? I am surrounded now. I am frantically waving my hands in the air, trying to direct their attention to the wall I crossed to get here and also to find someone with power-2.5 glasses. (Actually, I have glasses of power 2.5). I recognize Pai in the crowd. He has a disinterested look on his face or rather he looks like he is pissed off at something I did. I look away from him as I black out ...

... I am standing on the snow capped slope. This time I am facing away from the steep section that earlier scared me. I have a machine gun in my hand and I am shooting up the slope. I am wearing military uniform and I seem to be in some kind of war. “I need to get away from here”, I think, as I run towards the wall with a hole. I go through the hole, hide on the other side of the wall and throw a bomb towards the slope. I think of “Napalm” while doing this. A group of 4-5 people also in military uniform, but those who felt like the enemy, run through the hole trying to escape the impending explosion.

The bomb goes off and I run back towards the slope. “I need to escape before they call the bluff and get back”, I think as I run on snow, covered with turmeric, towards the steep section. This time I just jump down, take a U-turn and start climbing a slope that runs parallel to the one I just came down from. I am halfway up when I meet 3 more people in uniform. I can’t recognize their faces but they are holding a map of India. One of them shows me where we currently are and that’s somewhere near Goa. We make a plan to keep running up the slope till we reach Gujarat. We start up the slope ...

... I am walking towards my lab. I think, “If you want to see a dream again but this time control it to your liking, then go to sleep thinking about the dream.” Ya, right! Only the shooting part came right. I stop at the photo-board outside the Rensselaer Nanotechnology center. My photo is not on it and one of the girls in my research group is wrongly listed as an undergrad. “That’s not possible. I am still in a dream.” I look around, make sure there’s no one and slap myself twice ...

Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 3

It felt like home. There was the television on the far left corner and the dvd player below it. There was the blue colored divan on my right and the door to my grandmother’s room in front. My grandma was standing on my left and behind me was my uncle. At the same time something felt out of place.

I looked down and I was standing on a motorboat with a gun in my hand. Over to my left a giraffe’s head bobbed out of the water. My uncle started shooting at it with a shotgun but to no avail. Amidst all the gunfire, my grandma was talking to me. I couldn’t hear her completely but was able to make out the words “evil”, “giraffe”, “whale” and “terrorizing”.

Then I spot something moving fast under the boat. It was huge, a whale I presume. My uncle also seemed to have noticed it as he started shooting into the water. As soon as the boat reached the entrance to my grandma’s room, I jumped out onto solid ground and started shooting at the whale. 6 shots! Empty! I noticed I had another gun in my left hand. “ I have to conserve this. We have a long night ahead of us”, I thought as the boat sped away into the open sea.

I open my eyes. I am lying face down on a mattress on the floor of my grandma’s room. When did I fall asleep? Was I dreaming about the whale? No way, it has to be real. I look up and turn left. Ammoomma, a lady who has been helping out my grandma with the household chores since around the time I was born, is squatting on the floor next to the divan. She is saying something and gesturing with her hands but I can’t hear her. There is a loud noise in the background. “It’s something about the whale, I am sure. I must turn the noise off so that I can hear her”, I think as I crawl over into the living room. The noise is from the television set. There’s something in the dvd player. I press the pause button but before I could ask her about the whale, I black out.

I open my eyes and I am again on the mattress. It’s morning now. I can hear my grandma in the kitchen. I walk through the living room into the kitchen.I ask my grandma , “Athine kittiyo?” (Did we catch it?). She replies in the negative, “Evidennu!”. I walk back to the mattress. I see a bed beside it and my uncle is sleeping on it. I fall onto the mattress below and close my eyes.

The online alarm went off at 7, as usual. I woke up in my room in Troy, NY, logged in to my computer and shut the alarm. I didn’t feel like going back to sleep. I browsed Facebook for a while and checked the latest cricket scores. I remembered what I had read about dreams a couple of days back. If you want to see a dream again but this time control it to your liking, then go to sleep thinking about the dream along with a rough alternate storyline based on what you wish to see.

Now, I wanted to try that out asap. I thought of shooting and killing the whale, as I slowly drifted into the subconscious...

Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 2

Read “Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 1” for a background on my 1st experience with a lucid dream.

I had just got back from a strenuous hike to Algonquin and Wright on the Adirondacks High peaks. These are definitely not the toughest of the High Peaks, but I still found them strenuous because the terrain of the trail was almost entirely rocky and in some stretches slippery as well. Slip, I did, plenty of times, but fortunately was always able to regain control before hurting myself.

In any case, I get back, watch a couple of movies including Shawshank Redemption, set the alarm on my phone for 7 a.m Sunday Morning, and drift off to sleep. The alarm goes off at 7 and as usual I switch it off and go back to sleep.

I am climbing a rocky face of a peak. It’s quite steep and I have to strain all the muscles in my body to pull myself up. There are two others with me. I can’t see their faces but just as in the previous dream, I don’t feel that they are strangers. I am trying to get to a building on top of the peak. I have this strange sense of impending danger and I seem to be on a mission to save someone who has been forcefully detained in the building. I don’t know who that someone is, but it must be someone I care for since I have this strong feeling of loss.

I am pulling myself up holding onto a protruding rock. One of my co-climbers is on the others side of the rock and I can see a waterfall beyond him. The second of my co-climbers is a little ahead of us and almost at the top of the peak. That’s when I slip. I hold onto the rock with just one hand, but I feel like my grip is loosening.

I suddenly find myself transported into the body of the climber who is almost at the top. I feel no sense of remorse for my friend who had just slipped. It was like the “new me” did not even know that two other climbers existed. (I would like to think of the three climbers to be the same person along different timelines in the same universe, each following a path based on the different decisions I could have made while climbing up the cliff. Just as I realized that my first timeline would result in my death, I had jumped into a different one. Of course, this may sound like a pile of bull but cut me some slack, this is after all, my dream and my journal).

In any case, I jump, hold onto a wooden fence, and pull myself onto the top of the peak and into the building. There I see my youngest cousin on my Mother’s side (Hari). I am not sure if it was him that I was trying to save, but I had no time to ponder about that. I had just seen the villain in the dream, someone I was feeling a great sense of revulsion to. (Strangely though, the “villain”, resembled the Malayalam movie star, Jayaram). I reach out and grab his throat. He doesn’t resist, but he mutters something I found very strange. “There is this old saying. A meow is always a meow, but an eliyah can be an eliyah or a puliyah.”

(What was that? Meow is easy to understand, but by eliyah and puliyah, if he meant eli(mouse in malayalam) and puli(tiger in malayalam), then where does the “-yah” come in? I must be becoming crazier by the day.)

I have this strange sense of deja vu as soon as I hear him say those words but I can’t recollect why. I suddenly feel something on my back and I find myself shirtless. I look over my shoulders I and see a rat clinging onto my back. It’s small claws were clamped onto my back and I was finding it difficult to pull it off. I start to panic. I call out “Hari, help me.”, only to find him transformed into a mouse. I was still gesturing towards it to fight off the “evil” rat on my back. Hari cringes and runs off to the corner of the room.

I somehow manage to pull the rat off my back. I am holding it in my hands as I ponder over what to do with it. (In the dream, I seem to go over three possibilities, one after the other.) First, I instinctively throw it away to a corner of the room and watch the rat scamper away. Then in an instance I am holding the rat again. This time I throw it over the cliff that I just climbed. It was still not done. This time, I walk to a corner of the room and throw the rat into the Falls. I think, “This time I have got rid of it permanently”, as I wake up.

Dreams, Parallel Universes and Alternate Realities - 1

It’s been almost a year since I last posted an article on this blog. Maybe I was too lazy to pen my thoughts or possibly I had no clue about what I should write on. In either case, I would like to think I kept myself busy over the last one year gaining new experiences so that one day something would strike that would rekindle the fire to write again.

Until it finally did after a small conversation with one of my room mates about dreams (actually part of a very long conversation about our mind and the universe) and my subsequent exposure to Inception, Donnie Darko, Being John Malkovich and Identity in one stretch. Maybe watching and later thinking about these movies have driven me crazy but on the plus side of things I finally get to write again. For the first time ever, over the last few days, I have started lucid dreaming.

And today it happened for the second time, and in both cases I was in the first stage of Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming, where I have no control over what is happening but still conscious that I am dreaming. That was when I started reading more about it and thought about making a dream journal. And so with that aim in mind, this post is the first part in a series of entries.

I am in a shower. The bathroom resembles the one in my current house in Troy. I remember that I have to hurry. I have a class at 8 in the morning. But wait, there are three others in the shower. I can’t see their faces but I don’t feel that they are strangers. I can see them,yes, but none of them seem to realize the existence of the others. All of them seem to be in their own unique universe.

I start thinking, did I suddenly get the power to view parallel universes? Or, are they characters from within my own subconscious, are they my own alternate identities? I had just watched Identity the previous night. Am I in some kind of medical treatment where my own identities are pitted against each other? I keep hoping it is the first of those options as I close my eyes in the shower.

I open them to find myself walking on a corridor towards a room. The corridor and the location of the room reminded me of my 5th Standard classroom in Indian School, Dar-es-Salaam. I open the door and I walk in. I see two people in the room. Their faces remind me of Abhijith and Sebastian (two people I knew in CVK and NITC respectively). They are already in the ISD uniform. I look at my watch. It is already a little past 8. They were waiting for me. I pack my bags and walk out again.

I find myself inside a cafe, which seems to a blend of two cafes in the RPI campus. I ask the lady at the counter for a coffee. I bend forward a little bit to take a look at all the goodies inside the shelf. I see a bagel and point at it while asking the lady to pack that too. She comes forward, opens a “door” to the shelf and mutters, “Do you really want me to do this?”, as she walks into a deep freeze that seems to have magically appeared in place of the shelf. I was a little disoriented by now and close my eyes again.

As I open my eyes, I am back in the room with Abhijith and Sebastian. They were still waiting for me but neither said a word. I take a look at my watch. It is 8.45 a.m. I think, we could, well, manage to slip into the classroom during the 9 a.m break in between the two hour class, and we walk out. We were walking through the ISD grounds when I suddenly start searching the pockets of my jeans. (Why am I not in uniform? I have no clue. I was wearing the blue jeans that I wear to lab and class in RPI almost every single day).

Wallet - check, keys - check , handkerchief - check, phone --- I feel a sudden sense of panic. I had left it on the table in the room. Wanting to confirm, I ask my friends to place a call to my cellphone. One of them does and replies that someone actually answered the call.

I turn back and run towards the room. I see a few younger ISD students in uniform running out of that room. Two of them I saw had cellphones in their hands. I look closely and see that one of them, a scrawny lad with a turban, had a phone that had a greenish fluorescent base. I run towards him. I call out the name Harjinder (To be honest, I have no idea why. The only Harjinder I know is a post doc in RPI. Though I did know one Harbinder in ISD, the boy I was chasing didn’t look like him). He doesn’t stop but I manage to catch up with him, land a nice solid punch on his face, take the phone from his hands and walk back.

Almost instantly I am confronted by a lad with thick black glasses. I have never seen that face before. But he wanted to take me to the Principal’s office. I heard him muttering words like fair and trial. As soon as I heard the word fair, I started mocking him and laughing hysterically till we found ourselves inside the staff-room. (It resembled the one in ISD but the Principal sitting in the desk in front looked like my school Principal from CVK). She starts talking, “Based on your history...”. I interrupt, with a weird smile on my face and a strange satisfaction inside me. “I am a Science Student. I don’t take History as a Course”. Then she says again with a serious, angry and disappointed look, “Based on the history of your grades, you rank in the bottom eight of the class”. I started laughing again. “ That’s not possible. I am surely in a dream”. Those were my last words as I continued laughing, thinking that since I am in a dream, I could do anything I wanted and get away with it.

I find myself on the corridor outside the staff-room. In front of me I can see the Principal and the spectacled boy discussing something. I continue laughing, mocking the two of them. I hear a rumble of footsteps from behind. I turn back to see students running out of classrooms into the corridor. I lose balance and fall as I finally wake up.

It’s a Friday morning in July. I am disoriented, yes, who wouldn’t be after jumping in and out of characters and locations spanning 15 years of his life, but I am also strangely happy. Maybe, the after effect of laughing for so long.

I had set the alarm on my phone for 6.30 a.m as always, and as usual I had gone back to sleep after switching it off. It’s summer break now and all I have to do is research. So I tend to sleep till 10 in the morning before getting up and going to the lab. Of late I had started cursing myself for wasting my time sleeping, but as I later read more about lucid dreaming, I realized it wouldn’t be too bad at all as long as I got something to write about. Studies strongly suggest that a nap a few hours after waking in the morning is the most common time to have a lucid dream. If that’s true, then I have 5 more weeks to experiment with dreams.

From the chronicles of my last month in India - June 24th 2009

I had just got back from Chennai yesterday morning. I got the US F1 visa, yes, but what a hassle it was. The interview lasted just a couple of minutes and the whole process took just a little over an hour. That is quite fast considering the number of applicants I saw there that day. But the hassle was not on the interview day. It lasted for almost 2 weeks just before the D-Day. Owing to a paranoia that though I had already been offered a Graduate Assistantship it was better to get as many financial documents as possible (not fake by the way) even those that I had just a minimalistic probability of being asked for by the interviewer, we ran around different banks getting all the necessary statements. As it turned out, during the interview they asked for none of the documents I worked so hard to obtain.

Anyway I now find myself on Dennis's home turf in Kodagu. Just a little over 24 hours back I had only returned to Trichur after the visa interview in Chennai. After getting back home I had quickly repacked, had a bath and within a couple of hours I was all set in a bus to Calicut to join 19 friends from college. We had planned a trip to Dennis's home and we set out in two cars from NIT Calicut, a Santro and a Wagon R. Then later, Kiru's Santro and Shillu's i10 joined us from Wynad. I was in Sajju's Santro along with Frijo, PKV and Roney. I was sitting right behind Sajju who was in the driver's seat. It was a great road trip at night. It wasn't that eventful and all but
for some reason it just felt great. Three of the best moments during the trip were obviously the sighting of a lone elephant on the road through Wynad Wildlife Sanctuary, the sudden transition from a good road to a hopelessly atrocious one across the Kerala-Karnataka border and of course the Pitch Black effect.

It was a cloudy day and we were inside a thick forest. The only lighting in the path was that of the car headlights. You switch that off and you will really learn what it is like to be blind. It was the blackest darkness I had ever seen in my life. And what more! Sajju kept trying it out a few times each black out lasting for a couple of seconds. I must admit, that was fun even if it risked us getting trapped in front a lone elephant which we might suddenly see in our path just as the lights were turned on again.

However, we reached Dennis's home without incident by around 11.30 at night taking the less travelled road via Tholpetti and Kutta. It was a really bad road after the border, but it was fun too except maybe for the owners of each car who would have empathised with the car's suspensions having to deal with such brutality. We had dinner and we were off to bed...

"I am running. I look down at my watch. Great! I am late again. Oh god! More than 30 minutes late. I am now supposed to be sitting in my Economics Class. Fantastic! I already have over 8 bunks. I reach the class and with a long, sad face I try to get in. And of course the Sir shows me the way back out... The scene changes suddenly. I seem to be in an examination room. I look around. I see the Economics Sir coming towards me. He takes my answer sheet back and politely asks me to leave. I am not supposed to be writing the exam owing to attendance shortage, it seems. Attendance shortage! In final year! Excellent! A year lost, my MS-PhD admit gone, my job also thrown away, all because of one subject - Industrial Economics! Great! Distraught, I walk back not even being able to summon the resolve to cry my heart out. I keep walking and walking. I go past F hostel, I go past E Hostel but still I keep walking. Into the bushes I walk and still keep walking until..."

I find myself awake. Maybe it was a bump with the wall beyond E Hostel or maybe something had stirred me in the real world. Anyway I am fully conscious now. I look at my watch. It is 8 in the morning on June 24th 2009. I was up after a long swim in the depths of sub-consciousness. It was a strange dream, yes, but understandable considering that I am after almost a month, again in the company of NITC friends. It is of course possible that some of my worst fears of NITC life had come alive last night. But, now is high time I let it all go, it is time I relinquish my hold on all of those few painful NITC memories of the last semester. It is time that I start waiting in anticipation for my new life in the US.

From the chronicles of my last month in India - June 18th 2009

I suddenly open my eyes. I don't know what woke me up, but now that I am awake i realise that my left cheek is wet. I am lying face down in a pool of drool. What I just had was the craziest dream ever. I can't recollect everything but oh boy was it crazy. It was about to get crazier still, but something woke me up, I have no idea what. Maybe a sudden swerve of the train on the rails, maybe someone brushed past my legs as they walked through the gap between the side berths and the main berths in the 2nd class sleeper, or maybe my sub conscience had already reached the pinnacle of madness.

Anyways, now I am up. Last thing I remember was running into a godown, stacked with cartons all round. It felt like I was in a drug smuggler's den, again I don't know why. I hear sounds coming from further inside the den. I panic. That's the last thing I remember about the dream. I am up now. Maybe it was the sudden shock in the dream that woke me up.

The grills of the train window reveal light outside. I lift my face from the drool and take a look at my watch. It shows 5.30. Too early for it to be bright outside, I thought for a second before I drowned into the drool again and went into my next phase of dreamy siesta. At around 6 I wake up again. I see mom standing near my berth and she remarks that we would be reaching Chennai Station any time soon. So I get off the upper berth and proceed towards the wash basin at the back of the compartment.

As I was brushing, I was still thinking of the dream I had had. I remember it clearly. That is unusual. Normally when I am fully awake, other than maybe patches of the dream I am never able to recall every scene in it's right sequence, but I can now. Moreover, I vividly remember dreaming in colour but I have no proof to argue with experts declaring that dreams are black and white.

"I am walking down a lane. The lane looks vaguely similar to the road that runs beside Westend Supermarket near my grand-mom's house in Trichur. I look back. I can see my Grand-mom and mother walking behind. Suddenly I hear a loud rumble coming from the front of me. Innumerable number of trucks carrying one elephant each were hurtling their way down the road at super fast speed. Fear gripped my mind as the trucks neared closer. The elephants were not securely chained at the back of the truck. A sudden swerve of the truck that was just beside me resulted in the elephant behind being flung over my head somersaulting as it landed a few feet away. My gaze shift to the other trucks in front of me. I could then see more elephants in the air. I turned back. My mom and grandma had already run through the gates of another compound to our left. I noticed a gate right in front of me. I flung the gates open and ran into the compound. I was again in the godown stacked with cartons all around. I hear sounds from inside. This time I didn't panic. I decided to take a look. I take few steps forward when I hear my mother calling me from behind. I quickly turn back and...", there I was lying face down in the pool of drool!