BETWEEN SLEEP AND DEEP.
Sometime I go to bed early. It is either because my creative flame has gone out or the programme on TV, to which I direct my mind as to recuperate my creative flame-are so shoddy and soul destroying. There is nothing left for me but to seek refuge in sleep.
But my body clock is not tuned to that early entry to sleep and I have to force myself to sleep, which is not always successful. When at last I am in my pre-sleep period between wake and half wake, I step into a sort of trance where anything could happen--where past, present and future jostle each other for a place and sometime they form themselves into weird shapes and sequences and where anything logically impossible could happen.
I was slowly drifting into a state of non identifiable state of numbness and tried to recollect my own identity and which I could not do which resulted in panic and that panic made me come out of that state into more rational state of mind where I could recall my personal identity. How fickle is our life! and memory is the only binding force to our past and hence to our personal identity.
After sometime I drifted again to a sort of somnambulist state and things began to happen. Ghostly shadows and projections began to appear on the screen of my mind. I sensed that a woman was standing near my bed looking at me.
‘Do you recognise me?’ she enquired
‘I have some familiar feeling about you but I cannot put my finger on it.’ I replied
‘We used to be lovers long time ago.’
‘You are not by chance Annie?’
‘Yes I am. You still remember me.’
‘Only in my intuitive mind there is a feeling that I know you and we were part of some close liaison in the past.’
‘But I do not think you really cared for me. When I proposed to you, you rejected me. Remember in the old Hightree Woods.’
‘Yes I remember. How have you grown and aged!’
‘Yes I have children and grand children now. Do you still love me?’
‘Honestly no. If you were still attractive. I might have.’
‘So you only love someone with physical beauty.’
‘That is true but if you had other personal attractive traits. I might get attached to you.’
‘I am disappointed in you.’
‘So I am.’
Usually these events of my half awake state seemed real and I often thought of turning it into some fictional writing pieces. If such events of dream state can be turned into a fictional state, there might be a chance of turning myself into a subject of my own fiction.
Is it possible that in our supernatural state, we are portions of a structure of some larger plot and that art of super-mind through aesthetic mode can give us another kind of reality-though fragile but with abundance of meaning which we try to find in vain in our waking states. Here aesthetic imagination does the work of transformation of psyche.
The woman we love- even an average typed that attracts us can in transformation, become some magical person. Our imagination and the phenomena of unknown desires can turn the whole process into a sort of an intriguing show.
I recall the days of my romance when I had a crush on Annie and her very presence used to put me into a magical state of mind and the distance from her used to put me in an unpleasant state of mind. All the physical contacts and the caresses which I used to savour became afterwards instruments of torture. As she sensed her power over me, she began to exploit it to her full advantage. Sometime when I visited her place, there was no answer to door bell, whether she was in or not I could not be sure of as she had the knack of intensifying my tortures simply by not answering and ignoring me.
When afterwards we met on some other date, she usually apologised and extended her sweet beguiling smile as to overpower me with her hypnotising looks and thus increasing her dominance over me.
Durlabh Singh(C) 2013.
