The Dreamer lies still on the floor of a dark room. It’s dark enough for the walls to vanish.
She recollects what it felt like to stand by the door of a moving train. She hears the loud metallic rhythm of wheels hitting the tracks and the distant whirring of engine. Harsh wind hits her face and hair from all directions, as though laughing at her naivety. She sees villages and grasslands move too fast to see any one thing. The wind reminds her of the sea. She can hear waves now and the wind is playful. Above her stretches a vast shore now. “You don’t reassure me anymore”, she tells the sea. “I feel enraged standing by the beach. You throw back to the shore what yearns to drown in you”, she weeps.
A colleague had told her recently- “I wish I was you, Dreamer”. The colleague lies next to her now, watching indifferently. She turns to face her. “No, it’s ridiculous in here. I wander helplessly in a web of uncertainty, desperate to hold on to truth. It’s like chasing a feather in a storm. And I fail over and over again as it slips away each time. There are times I’m lost, when I doubt the existence of truth itself”.
A song plays itself in her head, in a language she didn’t understand. The percussion accompanies the sounds of the train now.
A Friend appears to her left, concerned but distant. The Friend smiles sadly. “You hold on to the feather, don’t you?” The Dreamer asks. The Friend nods, “I see what’s untrue. It’s all just lies. We eat, digest and thrive on lies. We are entangled like insects caught in a web. Most of us don’t know we’re trapped. We convince ourselves it’s normal” They cry quietly. “We are able to address what is, just as it is, freely here. We can breathe. Such a friendship untangles that web little by little. Thank you, thank you…”
The Friend stands beside her by the train door now. She hums a familiar tune but it’s lost in the rhythm of the rest.
A lizard croaks from the window of her room now. “You’re death, aren’t you? You’ve been waiting inside the homes of people. You’re always in sight yet hidden. You’re watching everything. Don’t worry, I won’t let the secret out.”
The Dreamer finds her feet moving to the sounds of the train, the songs, the sea, the lizard, the mocking wind. “This could be a scene in a film”
She looks inward to find a Gulmohar tree. The tree has a large canopy that stretches out, like open arms reaching out. Hundreds of bloomed red flowers decorate the branches and the grass beneath. It’s home. A child stands under the tree, in the shade. “It used to feel natural to just Be. Was that wrong? Is it never going to feel like that again?” She didn’t answer and she didn’t know. She smiles and weeps, as always. She looks up at the waiting branches of the tree and at all the life in it- “i want to be responsible for all of this. I want to hold on. Helping me will hurt you. And I’ve hurt you deep enough. It’s terrifying and haunting to know that it will scar you and you walk willingly into it, with me. I cannot come to terms with this!”
The Dreamer is drawn back to the room and she sees the walls now. They’re very much there, stubborn and unmoving. She sees it all in the darkness. It’s the light that plays tricks, it’s the light that deceives. “I don’t want to sleep” she thinks. “As foolish as it sounds, it’s different when I wake up. It will all be gone by morning. I won’t remember and I won’t see or hear. It will be lost again, and again, and again. I don’t want to sleep”