Dreaming is an odd experience. You fall asleep in the real world and wake up in the realm of possibility, a place where the laws of nature no longer apply. You can fly and slay dragons, or bring down walls with a single blow... You can do anything, be anything. The possibilities, though endless, do seem to be determined, at least in part, by your own experiences. I don't know if it's fruitless to try to control dreams. I've had plenty of lucid ones but none felt like they were a result of any particular skill or effort on my part.
Either way, the process is usually the same. You dream, you wake up, you forget. The moment you open your eyes, the dream begins to slip away, the edges becoming fuzzy until all that is left is the vague feeling of having dreamt and none of the details of the dream itself. Every now and then, one will stick around, though after a certain amount of time, it is wise to wonder if what you recall is the dream itself or the recollection of the recollection of the dream, distorted further with each new iteration. This is an experience I am well acquainted with and one I have fought against tirelessly since I was a child.
I have filled countless journals with descriptions and snippets, anything and everything I could remember of my dreams. My goal was never to alter, but simply to examine. I coveted them with the fascination of a seasoned collector, hoping to amass enough that one day I would look at them in just the right way and a pattern would emerge. Some image would jump out, like they do in stereograms, and it would reveal an essential truth about me.
That never happened.
However, one dream did stick around. One day in early 2019, when I was studying in Hyderabad, I woke from one of those dreams that are less participatory and more like a cinematic experience. One in which I wasn't a character but had the pleasure of watching the story unfold from a safe distance. It ended on a cliffhanger. My roommate, at the time, prodded me gently, letting me know it was time to go to the yoga class I had unwittingly agreed to the night before. I climbed out of bed, went to the class, returned home, made breakfast, and sat down to eat at our shared balcony.
"What did you dream?" My roommate asked.
I reached for the dream with languid fingers, expecting to find it faded to near inexistence and give some vague answer based on its remnants. But as my fingers brushed its edges, they found them sharp and clear. There it was, impossibly yet utterly unmarred by the passing of time, unsullied by the crossing of the veil. Startled, I recounted it. Its clarity was a thing of curiosity and I have never been one to leave a mystery unsolved.
I recounted the dream again, to a different friend. Then another. Then another. The dream remained clear, not in the way a memory would, but in a way that felt as if I was watching the story unfold for the first time every time I shared it. The last friend I told it to suggested I write it down.
"Make a book of it," he said. "'cause if you don't, I will."
Fine, I thought, a book it is. I was doing part time work for an NGO in Gulbarga, around 5 hours away by train, and I would go there on some weekends. So the next time I boarded the sleeper train, I climbed to the top bunk and wrote.
I wrote the first fifteen chapters. They were info-dumpy and terribly written, and then final project season rolled around and, once again, I forgot. The dream slipped away as all the others had.
Years passed and I didn't think of it again, except on brief occasions during long road trips or nights by the fire when someone asked for a story and I shared the only one I knew entirely heart.
In 2022, having graduated the year prior, I finally had the time (and motivation) to rediscover my love for books. I read epic fantasies, historical romances, self-help books, literary fiction, dystopias, everything I had missed, and in all those pages, I found something missing.
Me.
It was unfathomable to me, that I had loved books so fiercely and for so long and yet had never produced one. I had stories bursting from my every pore and yet I had never taken the time to write any of them down. It seemed a terrible shame, though not an irremediable one.
That was the first step, realizing what I wanted more than anything was to write. I hunted down the document in which I had written the first fifteen chapters of my dream and reread it. Then, I deleted everything. It was the best feeling, that blank page. I knew the story and now I had the words to tell it.
When I reached inside my head, the dream reached back with eager hands. It was all but ready to claw its way out.
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