Nightmares | Triggered Dreams of the Dark | Dad’s Dust Devil Dream

Dreams. Mere inflections of reality. An alternate universe where a series of events occur involuntarily. They wield their power to show us nightmares. They blend in with fear to become a notion so abhorrent that you scream for help helplessly but nobody listens, but you. There is nothing you could do, but accept. Accept your fate. As you wait for that dagger to bring you back to life, or that steep fall to shake you alive. You wait. All you can do is wait.

The funny thing about nightmares is that they are always lurking in the corner of your beautiful dream. Waiting for their turn to alter your thoughts. With a sword of fear, they lance you the moment they see you or worse when you see them.

We lose control. Even if you are the boldest, the bravest of soldiers to have ever walked this wretched planet, you lose it. The mighty fall. The puissant crumble. The overpowering succumb. Nothing beats nightmares. Nothing but your own undeterred will to make it out alive.

DAD’S BAD DREAM: FROM A BAG OF NIGHTMARES

One such instant, I remember clear as a crystal is when my father let out a scream, shaken up by a nightmare one fine afternoon when we were back in Jaisalmer. The city shares its fair share of regular sandstorms. So maybe his dream could have been a result of it.

I was only a child then, buried in my favourite books. My dad had dozed off resting after a heavy lunch. I was sitting next to him, as he snored on the bed sleeping. Shaken up, when my Dad hooted out a shout, I found him wide awake, escaping from the nightmare he might have indulged himself into unknowingly.

I inquired:

“What’s the matter Dad?”

He said it was just a dream. A bad dream. I asked,

“What was it about?”

He said it might scare me and that I should not cling to it. But the adamant child I was, I beseeched until he gave in. He told me only a part of it, which wasn’t actually scary. But a child’s imagination makes everything akin reality. I have imagined and re-imagined it so many times before that it has lodged itself in my memory. Funny how I never forget anything!

THE DREAM

He said he was in his room when the door burst open, and a squall zoomed in. A dark misty whirlwind that tore the curtains down and rampaged past towards us, and that we (my elder brother and I) started screaming at the top of our voices.

“Papa! Papa!”

Our father was right there, surprised at the impending commotion that threatened his family. He instinctively sprang up to face the vortex, so that it wouldn’t hurt us. A trickle of fear tumbled down his forehead at the oddity of the thing.

The dust devil seemed unstoppable as it closed in on our dad. As it approached him, my father with all his might punched it. To his surprise, it metamorphosed into dust and fell right there. It could have been that very moment, my father let out a shriek of shock that probably brought him back from his nightmare.

Something, huh!

When my little head pondered as to why something like that would be shown, my father wrote me off with a

“It was just a dream.”

And that he had his hand on his chest, which acts like a trigger for nightmares.

REFLECTING ON DREAMS

Dreams don’t have an agenda. They depict the most bizarre of incidents. If only we had a surefire method to figure out the true purpose of dreaming, a sure shot way to understand and unveil methods of dream interpretation, things would be less hazy.

There are dream symbols sometimes that end up giving you déjà vu if you see them in reality. But there is nothing we can connect them to, and they end up getting lost like weak memories.