Dreams are a largely unexplored domain that has always fascinated me. It is said they are nothing but a creation of our dormant thoughts, beliefs, and fantasies. I have always been curious about how they function, and what could be more amusing than having a dream about how dreams work?
It was a gloomy, black-and-white sunset. I stood in a barren land stretching toward an endless horizon. In the empty void before me, a set of four or five cards—almost the size of windows—levitated in mid-air. Each card displayed a brief snapshot of a moment, and I quickly realized they were dream options I could choose from. Touching any of them would plunge me straight into that scenario. It was as if my curiosity had accidentally slipped me into the warehouse, the backend of the dream world, rather than dropping me into a dream itself.
I touched a card, and my environment seamlessly transitioned into the moment it displayed. The animation felt as though the card was expanding in height and width, camouflaging itself as the picture filled my vision. Once inside, I was swept along by the moments of the dream. The ups and downs, the excitement and the scares—everything flashed by in an instant as I hurtled toward the end. Most dreams tend to end when you become bored or sleepy, or when you encounter a tragedy too intense to handle, usually death.
As one dream ended, I would wake up or transition directly into another. After several of these jumps, I distinctly remember the final sequence. I found myself in a hospital bed, but it wasn’t the standard single-sized cot you usually see; it was vast, stretching as far as my blurry vision could reach. The scene was drained of color, dominated instead by a pale hue of grey. The doctor’s face was indiscernible, yet I lay there calmly. It felt like I had lived this exact moment before—a profound sense of déjà vu. I could hear the doctor asking me to count backward from ten. As I counted, I felt my head grow lighter, the anesthesia taking hold. I don’t remember finishing the count before abruptly waking up in my actual bed. I could immediately feel the stifling heat of the room and a slight ache in my back from an improper sleeping posture. “Am I still dreaming?” I asked myself. Maybe not, because it seems too slow, and just a bit too colorful.
In hindsight, whenever you try to recollect and summarize your past to describe it—whether to someone else or even just to yourself—it always feels incredibly fast, short, and entirely devoid of color.
~Dreamt on 17th May, 2023.