Notes On Dreams

After-dawn dreams. Whatever was dreamt feels engraved into these hours; it brings caution to the sleep after dawn break.

Afternoon dreams. I don’t remember seeing anything; the merry of white clouds. 

Evening dreams. There is no way out until you wake up, and even after you wake up, you are caught inside a gradual black cave, or a cubist painting. 

Night dreams. Half forgotten, many forgotten, but some we remember better.

While sleeping, the face of the sleeper vanishes into a range of distances. The dream, more than the dreamer, tells how much distance the face has traversed through time. A face closing into sleep is then a curtain fall, upon which the innocence that has gathered gets sealed away and becomes only partly accessible. As a bystander, I look at the face briefly, leave the sleeper alone and wonder what happens behind the fallen curtain that keeps them apart.

From the stock of daylights, minor events here and there are borrowed and in turn appropriated by the night’s veil, as hanging image-sounds; a mixed collage of our perceptions drawn from all the three tenses; of past, present and future; with the least rate of simplicity or perfect continuity. The drifting nature of dreams makes it hard to find the precise verbal kinetics that explain their strange paces, inside which the distinct angles of the subject and object remain cryptic.

In the dream field, images are independent clauses linked by an invisible dot and hook in between. These main clauses do not relate in meaning or idea to the nearby clause, yet they do not have complete meaning on their own. Dream, here, is what happens before and after any punctuation mark. On the other days, the meaning of the dream is derived from the mid-place, right where the punctuation mark is, more perceivable than the images that come before or after. What occurs in this general gap is a halt or fall within the dream. A halt that tests our optical patience or a fall that shoves us out of our bed. 

Once the dream has come and gone, it is a sentence I do not know if I ever read under the sun or the moon. An image I saw without knowing what it was, an image I knew without seeing it for real, yet one that I must pass by, or that must pass by me. In the extreme anonymity of these images,we see faces, their copies and anti-copies crashing into each other, running away from each other, and then climbing ladders, crossing unfeasible bridges in a single night’s span, thus making it difficult for meaning to enter. 

First field

The sleeper while dreaming is conjured by the centre points of the most decentralised routes, lying bound to his bed. He enters a series of lands through which the image strip spreads and breaks out of his current living to generate a multi-universe, one where the dizziness of these assembled geographies gives a glimpse of what a humiliated space might look like. Either he remakes or loses his way through the atlas he is half-given for the night.

Moving images in the dream are likely to persist when their pace submits to a familiar duration. Or it inclines to the extreme to imitate a fast-forwarded video or a painfully slow motioned footage. If the topography of the dream is an open space, we later recall the dream as a place of amenity with silhouettes for fine feelings, upon which our minor thinking faculties can exercise little homework the following day. If it is a closed space, we double-dream of getting out of the scene, to give birth to the dream-within-a-dream genre.

Docu-dream

Inside ‘the small theatre of our brains’[1], the visual culture that everyday ferments or rots as dreams is a mirage system that supplies us with uneven metaphors, allegories in a motion speed that often run high and unwise, without enough time to grasp what has happened while it happened. So we attempt to bring the vision back to the regime of the word, and when a series of words has extended the dream’s duration to the point of a short narrative, there have already emerged multiple relations, orders not written before and not grasped even after writing it down. The oral or written genre of docu-dream, if it has to exist, will exist just to make fiction of the vanishing dreams, irrefutable inside the non-fictive nights given to us, or to make one informed of the night’s didactics, to know what enslaves and elevates the individual wills in the beginnings and centres of nights. But spelling out the bad dream prevents forgetting the bad angel’s play. So, I use the genre of docu-dream to document unharmful dreams; to see the adult selves staggering and finding a mid-child’s ground in long hours away from the sun.

Cave

Whenever the duration of the dream is excruciatingly slow, there is an imminent strain for the sleeper’s capacity to see. Closed eyelids, with a laborious passivity, become in charge for arranging the outer vision every passing second. The sleeper, in turn, starts to summon all the ocular forces in the inner world for his rescue, to make him touch daylight with open eyes, under which only he can realise it was all merely a bad dream, dreamt in the absence of angels on the right shoulders.

If there is time left to sleep again after nightmares, the second sleep helps us withstand the dream’s first cave effect. If there’s no time to sleep again, being in contact with water, does the final clearing. Praise to the overseer God who effaced certain dreams no sooner than they intervened into the night and later opened the day with counter-access to breath and water, to cleanse the fatigue caused by the dream.

Mediums

At infrequent crossroads, in the traffic of many ignored images, some tinge of light arrives and gets delivered with a sensible narrative and landscape. Either you remember the narrative or the landscape or the protagonist in the dream; or you forget it partially or in whole. The next day, the sought-after dream and the commonplace dream is not recollected in the same page.

The image tracks become illuminated in the junctions where we let the dream undo itself, to see certain imitation of omnipresent mediums we know; light, wind, colour, favourite person, sound; whatever that incessantly moves and gathers, but without a centre until the body shifts to an open waking state to become the centre and, after which, the subsurface warps, movements and mediums come to a pause. The still-glacial rock that has just arrived in a new landscape, after miles and years of erratic travel. 

Below are some of the various channels through which the form of the dream appeared, drafted itself, vanished and reappeared. These are dreams hand-selected from diary notes that notified certain sounds, imitated media forms, made me wonder at the origin and death of these images.

Sound Image

A deer in my hands. From a huge cliff top, I threw the deer into the sea. The horizon tilted and the inner sea produced an audio that wished to overturn the terrain and accuse the dreamer at once. A third beat was heard inside the seer’s chest, sensing the asymmetry between the right and the wrong, feeling the elevation of the cliff from the seabed. All the outer lengths leading up to the deer on the cliff occurred for the sake of the third beat to be recalled in the chest later.

Overlay Image

A face I will come to know from my later age drops into a coastal landscape, where the cliffs and blue water meet. The union of face and place makes the duration transparent with feeling. In the mode of overlay, the face spreads, overrides the moral and physical order to disintegrate old knowledge, while the road under the cliff and the cliff above the road appear and disappear. I summon words in different arrangements; I cannot request the same dream back.

Photograph

 Horses from a friend’s photograph cameo entered the main stage of the dream, reward for the friend’s photography practice. 

Paper through Light

Light comes in through the right side window at the perfect hour and gives a straight vision on the left wing of the mind. The impressed picture: the face of a high paper, with scripts caused by the gradual exposure to morning light. The shadow-soft paper may be the evidence of a vertical prayer, half-accepted the previous night. I can wish for anything now to succeed but I am outlined and robed by the light of the dream.

Poem

A face of a poem written by an acquaintance. No title, a composite jpeg file.  

Animation

Seven planets drift in the blue solar sky with dense atmosphere; each of their individual strings held under the clasp of the narrator. In one haul, I pull them closer to my chest, and they become portable planets that can be possessed and released in a cosmos run by a timely glitch. One part of the illustration has set itself to motion, fills the frame with no pages to turn to. Following the release of the strings, planets arrange themselves to be in their previous position and resume their co-circular strides.

Videotapes

Two videotapes from childhood, tiny archipelagos surrounded by grey water and sleep.

child wandering—the beige frock—the Red Sea harbors.     

child with a mic—moving through—zero body tremor before the audience. 

Cubical image

Corridors, doorways and stairways emerge in double formats to introduce new spiral traits. Two. Four. Nine. Multi. Continues the generic dominion of transitional spaces in the dream’s time panel. Huge is the amount of relief received, coming out of that building. Huger the relief, when I see a friend fortunately passing by. The friend arrives when it is time for the sun to go down.

Over-exposed image

The speed of colours rises high; that the colour doesn’t want to remain in the objects, so they travel to the body of another, where there is no body to receive, so they hang in the air, origins vaguely traceable; for example, the flash of the reed grass dissolving into, dissolving under the blue sky. In the pretended suspension of colours, everything is enroute and remote from their root place of entrance; and in the pretended passage of colours, the one who is holding this image in their palm doesn’t want to ever enter the image.  This is a dream catalogued by mistake under the influence of electronic music.

Camera

Meanwhile, I am out, holding a pair of balloons and a camera to trace the shadows that I make while crossing the road. It takes me a while to hear the song they chant in the funeral procession, carrying the dead person with the sound of his name, ‘Eugene Smith’, ‘Eugene Smith’. I wonder, with second-hand guilt, about the disservice capable with the camera and personal vocation, when fellow neighbours actively walk and chant in multiples, honouring the death that continues to miss the radius of my attention.

Second-largest moving image

A ship rider and I show the scariest waves to my mother’s sister. I tell her it’s better to be blind to the waves, so we can see the untroubled version of a sea. Later, sea wind put the passenger and the rider at temporary ease through temporary love, which protect them from themselves through mutual recognition.

Sentence

‘My mind is implied in you, besides my six other friends’ as a received message from an online acquaintance.

Car

The car enters, headlong and straight, into the Prophet’s green dome in Medina. So straight that the first unconcealed vision from the wind screen is the dome, where the Prophet lives now, after having permanently exited from the dream of this world. As pilgrims take a U-turn to park the car underground and far, the time and tear are reversed through the votive vision in the sleep.

Barbie movie

The nauseous film director complains about why the colours in the women’s saree blouses don’t complement the blue of the sea. She reasons that the colours don’t align simply because the presence of a few strangers interfere with the island and sea. On the other pole of the island, adolescent girls yearn to climb one plane of ocean above another. What began as a single stack of oceanic water in the first scene multiplies into an apartment of water plates stacked one above the other, hallowed out of the walls. The girls climb with bad will. A dream that carried a water structure now become the super glossy, hyper real artefacts in the Barbie movies.

Miscellaneous folder

Sky weight, chocolates, old professors, gun shoot, rape, smoke, fire, classroom, shop of lights, broken chair. Yesterday’s dream summary.

Today’s dream summary

Rose plant travels from Oregon to Kuttiady. Through noise, I can paint further detail from the dream’s memory but then another key event intervenes from the neighbouring hilly district—

mangoes dropping from the highest treetop to the bottom ground.

When sleep ends, the sounds and sights from outside feebly nudge the body as a diffused feeling, one we don’t readily absorb before it visibly staggers through our skin. Childhood and late childhood near their conclusions (pre-chorus), and absent preoccupations are openly interrupted by neighbours who had been waiting on mute. They enter through the backyard while the curtain lifts from the sleeper’s face; birds restate their morning chorus in no order, against which the dreamer tries to put back the dream in order. If content with the makeshift memory of it the sleeper might fall into the fractioned mirage once again, in hope of a linear resolution through a final image, which by now has likely crossed the finish line and is beyond the dreamer’s reach. Following the final reopening of eyes, the material and secret of the mirage would be fully replaced or made much less firm with the kinship of open air, through which, sleepers may or may not find guidance again, after the reckless history of going from one image to another, night after night, with or without Godspeed.

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[1] Chapter on Dreams by R. L Stevenson