A Dreamt Up Heaven

A Dream or Heaven?

It was a beautiful afternoon, a mild one. We’d just played frisbee in a lush green field, damp with dew under a dome-shaped sky. When it started to get cloudy, we retreated to our room.

And then we lay down on the floor, our hearts beating faster and faster through each passing minute, my mind waiting in eager anticipation. My senses started to get clearer, and I could almost see without my glasses. It was getting colder in the warm room – or we could feel the coldness more vividly. I look up. The ceiling danced with the music, the colours ebbing and more colours taking over with each beat of the slow trance. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the room danced with us.

My friend told me about his childhood and the people he’d met, and my thoughts are racing beyond my motor abilities. I couldn’t write them down, but at some point his voice breaks – breaking down with the people who’ve broken down, with souls tormented through their childhoods, and I could feel their pain – my chest aches. He’s feeling their pain. It’s wonderful how you can empathise. I find myself feeling, our emotions in synchrony and my facial muscles mirroring his.

I wanted to sink into the background and observe the dynamics of my surroundings. My friend was sharing a lot of things that I possibly couldn’t keep with me forever, and I didn’t feel like sharing because for some reason, my own experiences seemed insignificant. I kept getting lost in my thoughts from time to time, and by navigating my way through these loops of thought I found my mind forming an abstract being that presented, analysed and concluded, to me, each greatly pleasant thing, each blatantly horrible thing that I’d ever experienced and the conclusions were all the same: it didn’t matter.

I’m not a simple sum of my past. I’m much more than a linear function of whatever I’ve experienced. I’ve got to be at least a weighted sum. At least.

And then my friend distracted me.

I’d been urged to look at myself in the mirror. In the mirror facing me, I saw a woman that I’d always wanted for myself. My eyebrows looked more enhanced, my cheeks just chubby enough, my skin evenly dark brown and clear. I felt satisfied. Suddenly, I was aging; I was aging fast. I was then old enough to be buried. And then I was a baby again, with big eyes and an innocent, full smile – Circle of Life.

I felt so pure, I felt so cleansed and I had the answers in my head. “The outlook of yourself from the eyes of yourself”, I said, the mirror episode still holding my emotions high. I felt the presence of what I believe was the supernatural being of the world – I saw the cosmos with all its dust, debris, light, and there lay the answer. In neuroscience, we have a saying – if there are two strong theories pitted against each other, the answer most likely lies in between the two. If life is to be defined by a set of independent parameters that can be varied to create differences, there’s only a tiny set of continuous variables that you can change – we’re neither completely free nor completely deterministic. Everything else is dependent on one another. Was I trying to say that we’re probabilistic? This notion – note that I was dreaming – felt profound at that moment.

I was entranced. I looked outside the windows. I see how big the sky is, how predominantly green the leaves are. I was nothing. I was a nobody, and yet I was a part of this universe. I felt in me a strong longing to sit on the Earth as naked as I was when my physicality became sentient, to feel the mud with my palms, to fuse into the mud and be with the world. I felt my shoulders unburden, my posture loosen and my face get relaxed. I need the mountains. I need to look at the world on top of the mountains, feel small and comforted.

Each cloud in the moving sky formed a greater pattern; I could find faces in each passing snapshot of the sky. Nothing about myself felt significant: my curiosity lay with the universe as its subject. I didn’t feel like I was trapped in a box anymore. I felt open, the ties between me and my people loosening, the ties between me and my problems disappearing. They just didn’t seem significant.

And then the room’s colours were fading away, and it was getting warmer. The room wasn’t rocking me anymore. I woke up with a headache and a smile.