Connoisseurs Of A Faithful Slumber: My Romance With Dreams

By Sanjukta Krishnagopal:

Every once in a rainy day, quite literally a rainy day, I find myself droning to a syrupy sweet memory that strides right past my prosencephalon (memory chamber of the brain) and rounds its force in my medulla oblongata (sleep centre). It’s a memory I cannot recollect very vividly, but it’s as lucid as the words in this unworthy attempt of a recollection. It’s a lullaby for my thoughts, picked exclusively and explicitly for me, and of course, by me. It’s stronger than the strongest force, yet weaker than the weakest force. It encompasses a vacuum in my brain, a vacuum that gives rise to everything else that makes even a tad bit of sense, and sense, my friend, is an intermittent visitor. This resonant thought is the silhouette of my entire life crunched in a minute shell that reverberates with the alternating constructive and destructive interference of my thought-waves.

It’s akin to a battery that charges me up for the monotony of this joke of a world. I glide, I fly, and I cascade past your dreams, and hopes, and ambitions. Everything you are, were, or will be, or at any point of time hope to be, I can feel it all, be it all, with my army that ripples past your conscience. I ask for it, and I get it; it’s my reign, my command and YOUR wish. I’m the nocturnal daydreamer in this psychedelic odyssey. All I need to do is lay my head on the settee and my mind sits with me on that very settee. It’s a place I can’t be afraid of, because it echoes my passion; concentrating its sweetness, making it more enticing than Aphrodite herself.

I dance, I write, I sing, I love, I laugh, I chortle, I soar, I dive, I chuckle, I giggle, I sneer, I mock. It’s this little dose of hallucinogens I like to take before I am forced to wake to the struggle of simulating all that, in this reality, I like to call dream. So I let this force in my head overpower me, drug me and then enlighten me. And I let this memory call upon its army to sweep the synapse clean, so as to speak. And I remain chained behind in the remnants of what I can only speculate. Each battle is noble enough to clean up behind it though, that much credit I duly grant it. It leaves behind no miscellanies that might misguide me into déjà vu. Every thought, every melody is phagocytic, giving me the benefit of novelty every time I delve into the realms of those war scenes again. How I write this, without guidance from the fragments of my imagination, I myself fail to comprehend. But I write this nevertheless, and write I do, with an avant-garde vengeance.

Every once in a while I croon to the bittersweet melody that the all-powerful forces thrust upon my innocuous brain, and I have this gut feeling, that all the connoisseurs of a contented slumber wouldn’t dare beg to differ. I wake to a reality I perceive as a dream, and I sleep to a dream that reveals my reality. Or vice-versa? Either way I’m a connoisseur of wonder and amazement, a connoisseur of those satiating forty winks. May the force be with you!