FICTIONAL DREAMS

In August 2017, I joined university as a physics major. The initial weeks were riddled with anxiety and deadlines. By the time things petered out into routine, I realized I had failed to become part of a friend circle.

In India, we had Mess’s for dining, where we would be served our meals. The food was poor, and the dal was mostly water, the rice had small stones that broke your teeth, and there was an insect for dessert. Even if you weren’t served one, a flying insect – a clothes moth, usually – would plop dead into your plate.

Our hostel was a quadrangle, and we all had individual rooms, but the toilets were shared among the residents. There were four of these in the hostel – one at each corner. The rooms were small, and each room was provided with a bed, a table, and a chair.

The first month after joining was very dry and seemed to be the continuation of schooling, as the classes were monotonous as usual, and we were still schoolchildren in temperament, and you could identify the usual groups while slouching and sulking at the back. Even so, the fact that things hadn’t changed much – except we were living alone now – was helpful for a gradual transition. I joined a club, but left it in a week, after I understood that it only acted as a social platform for perfunctory interactions and sticky relationships.

By the second month of my freshman year, my days had become structured: Classes from 8 am to 5 pm (there were breaks in between), then back to my room and lie on the bed till dinner, then walk to the Mess for a wretched dinner, and come back and complete homework, if any. If there wasn’t any, I would watch a movie.

In the evenings, when I was lying on my bed, tired from classes and devoid of all interest in anything that interested others, I would watch the overhead fan in my room go round and round like the hands of a clock. With each revolution there was a click because the fan canopy was loose. The periodic strikes were meditative, and I had profound epiphanies staring at the fan: I thought maybe everything – the world, and the people – was growing larger but in scale, so no one notices; people never talk about the same things; my stomach is perpetually trying to digest itself, and so on.

I worried that I was either insane or a genius. The latter, because it appeared as though geniuses were doomed to a life of depression and chastity, and I would rather be a jovial bumpkin, than an enlightened pooper.

One evening, after having given my last mid semester exam, I was lying on the bed in the evening and my head felt very heavy as I had not slept properly for many days, owing to the intense preparation that was needed for the exams. Sometime, as I was thinking about a particularly creepy scenario in which all adults in the world crawled instead of walked, I fell asleep.

I woke up to knocks on my door, and I opened the door. It was Vipul. Vipul was pale and had a long and fat neck with dirt circles surrounding it and had a few whiskers on his chin. There were always shiny sweat droplets over his upper lip. He lived in the same corridor as me, and to my knowledge, wasn’t extremely popular. I didn’t know why he had come; previously, we had only spoken in passing.

“Hey, Vipul,” I said. “Want to come in?

Vipul came in. He looked around the room.

“Brother, when’d you last open this room? It smells like a coffin in here!” he said.

“I’ll get the windows, sorry,” I said.

There were two glass windows that slid out on a friction hinge which was mounted at their top, and, in addition, there was a wire mesh. I opened the windows but kept the mesh closed as I didn’t want mosquitoes in my room.

“There,” I said, “it’ll be airy in no time.”

Vipul sat at the base of my bed and I sat in the chair. We remained silent for a bit.

“You want a Kit-Kat?” asked Vipul.

“Sure,” I said. He produced two tiny chocolates, probably ten rupees each, and handed me one. The wrapper was moist.

“So,” he said, “What do you do all day? I’ve seen you at dinner, sitting alone by the window. You eat quickly, and you eat very little like a rat, then disappear. What’s the deal? Are you a homosexual?”

“Fuck you, sister-fucker.” I replied.

Then we munched on our chocolates for a bit.

Vipul finished his, then got up and said, “I’m going for dinner now.”

It was 7:30 pm.

“Okay.”

“You want to come?”

“I’ll go later…”

Vipul left. I saw him out the door. He walked across the corridor and his flesh jiggled through his thin white t-shirt. He opened his room and went in. Maybe he was getting something – his phone or wallet – from his room, before going to the Mess. I went back inside my room and increased the fan to its highest speed to drive out his stench.

From then on, he came to visit me quite frequently, and I started to understand why neither of us were in any of the popular friend circles. Just sitting there, in my room, the two of us, munching on something that Vipul brought – he was a ready snack dispenser – I figured out we were dull. We never talked about anything consequential and concrete like the other guys, with them making plans and debating politics and talking about the future and their interests. Flat statements, and abuse aimed at each other’s mothers and sisters were the best we could manage.

Then one evening as I was lying in bed, and I was not able to think up any interesting scenarios, I found this website on my phone. It had books available for free, and even though they were pirated and illegal, I assumed with all the rapes and murders going on in the country I wouldn’t be arrested for reading books.

I read one book by an American. It was good, but I couldn’t relate to it. I closed the book after reading about forty pages and went for dinner. The next day was the same. The books required a lot of focus, and they concentrated too much on having a grandiose plot. I needed something dull and relatable that poked into the miseries of the mind.

About five months into the academic year (which started in August), just before the final exams for that semester, I found the book: Hunger, by Knut Hamsun. It was the purest form of love. I was in love with an abstraction, a creation of another man’s genius. How I related to that madman! Romping about in the streets, disillusioned and empty, and passionately reverent to a great cause – that of writing. What courage! Here was a character that was organic and true.

I wanted to be like that man. But for now, I needed time. I needed to read a lot more before I could write like that god of a human. After giving my exams for that semester, I went back home, and when I came back, I was armed with the ideas that had shaken up the world (even though my newfound literary passions had obliterated my marksheet). I had only to write a compelling narrative of my own. It was January 2018, when I came back to university after the summer break.

Then I really began. Over the summer, I had read about 40 canonical books, surely, I could write a great piece now. I sat down on my chair with a notebook and a gel pen with a full refill. I stared down the page. I wrote two lines, then scratched them. I wrote two more and scratched them as well. A quick dread gripped my legs and the hands of banality reached from the underside of my shirt to my neck, and I gulped continually. I had no talent, not an ounce of talent! Perhaps just like the man portrayed in the novel that I so worshipped. Where were all the incredible musings now? I looked up at the fan. Nothing but the fan, no crazy story weaving itself in front of my eyes.

This was the second semester of that freshman year. The semester had just started, and they had already increased the workload to diabolical extents. We were being treated as though we were mules from the 19^th Century; Physics, Math, Humanities, the courses were too many.

I completed my homework as fast as possible each day, and if Vipul knocked and asked to come in, I would tell him to get lost, and he would tell me that I am a teacher’s pet. I didn’t much care. I completed the day’s tasks and skipped the insipid dinner, and finally sat down to read and write seriously.

Despite my heroic struggle, I struggled to write even one good sentence that was original. Dying filaments of washed-up ideas strangled me as I wrote nonsensical lines which bred into paragraphs of triviality. I was reading these brilliant, ruthlessly powerful books each day, and though I liked a lot of them (a few were bad, too), I hated the creators for having used up all the ideas. There was nothing left.

Around this time, I think it was the mating season for sparrows, as two sparrows fluttered outside my window every morning, and tried to establish a nest on the window hinge. I had developed a habit of keeping my windows open (with the wire mesh closed), after Vipul had pointed out that my room smelled like a coffin.

There was a triangular space in the hinge where they tried to deposit dried vegetation each day, so I had to break their nest – whatever few twigs and leaves they had brought – daily, because consider this: What if they lay eggs inside that nest? Then I would never be able to close the window because the space in the window hinge would also close, and the nest and eggs would be demolished. And I wanted the option to close that window sometimes.

Each morning, as the sparrows chirped and fluttered outside my window, I broke their nascent nest and rushed off to class. Then I would come back and complete my academic tasks, and then try to write something of value.

Vipul was coming to my room only sporadically now, and I sometimes felt bad about that, because even though we weren’t very close, I knew I was good at dealing with loneliness, and was unsure about him. But mostly, I was too concerned with my own problems, and that was that.

Finally, one day in March, halfway into the second semester, my efforts were rewarded, and the following happened: I dreamt a violent dream of blood and mercy, and in the morning, with the sparrows shrieking outside my windows, I realized I remembered the dream quite clearly. And then it struck me that tapping into this unconscious resource might help me write truly original and powerful stories.

I sprang out of my bed, and feverishly put down details of my dream on the page. Then, as I was getting late for class, I had to stop. But I had gotten enough of it down, so that when I would come back in the evening, I could write something real and true using the notes as reference.

I came back from classes with intent in my footsteps. I shut the door and switched on the lamp and got to work. I liked to listen to music while writing, but that day I was scared to put it on, as I thought my emotions would be swayed and I wanted to write the dream clearly.

I penned down the dream. There was another thing on my mind: I was neurotic about one hemisphere of the brain being dominant than the other, and I was certain that my right hemisphere was a travesty. I couldn’t see images in exact detail, there were blurry flashes in which I remembered events/read books.

This was important because I wanted to capture the dream in high resolution, so that the idea behind the story, which I would construct from the dream, was original and precise.

After writing down whatever I remembered from the dream, using my memory and the notes I had made in the morning, I read what I had written. It was about two pages long. My lips quivered with excitement as I read it, because even though the words, interpreted literally as they were written, did not exactly insert the images which comprised my dream into the reader’s mind, the pages really looked as though they were the work of a genius because the narrative so constructed appeared unique. I had done it! I waved the pages in the air and danced in my small room. I had content, and I had a plan.

***

Following that day, when I had thought of this brilliant idea, my plan was simple – dream, and use those dreams to generate unique story material.

And so, I slept. I slept with discipline and resilience. I was Sleeping Beauty, I was Sleepy the dwarf, I was Snorlax.

Whenever I was lucky enough to get potent dreams that had a narrative structure to them, I would directly use the dreams as stories, modifying them as necessary, and if they did not have a structure, and were instead only flashes and snapshots of colors or emotions, I would use those elements and make a story that had organic substance to it.

Needless to say, my studies suffered, as did my friendship with Vipul. It wasn’t even a friendship now that I think back to it. We met one day, and he implored me to have dinner with him, and I ever so politely declined his proposal, and following that day we had had a few interactions over a period of months. By the time the academic year was ending, we only saw each other in corridors or hallways in the academic block, and made eye contact, then broke it, then went our way.

But the time I was spending on trying to dream worked (well, some days it did). The gods spoke to me in the dreams, and demons cowered away in despair. I floated above the mustard fields of Madhya Pradesh, and swam in the Ganges, screamed my lungs out on top of the Himalayas. I had connected with the light inside of me, and the stories would flow smoothly.

On the last day of that year, as I packed up my things – a different room would be allotted for the year following – I received an email from a magazine to which I had sent one of my stories. It was a rejection, but it was quite polite:

Dear Ishaan,

Thank you for your interest in our magazine, however, we find the submitted content to be unsuitable for our market, even though the idea behind your work is interesting.

Sincerely,

Rudra Mistry

Nilgai Publication House

Well, of course it was interesting! I had lost my brains, the neurons had slowed down to snails, I had just suffered too much for my work to not have been any good.

***

It was May 15, 2018, and I woke up early in the morning to catch the train to Delhi where I lived. My freshman year had ended. I took the suitcases outside my room. It was time to leave. I went over to the windows to close them for the last time, but I couldn’t – the sparrows had made their nest. Towards the end I had forgotten to break their nests because of the exams, the writing, and packing, and now look. The sparrows looked at me innocently from their little nest and bobbed their heads. Oh, well. The sparrows were there, and I was there, and it was time to go, so I said goodbye to the birds and left the room.