Miswhispered Dream

What had struck me immediately as I walked into the garden was the terrible disassociation I shared with my presence. And perhaps, that accounted for my absence too, from the garden.

Detachment: The coma of the awake. And I knew, like I always had instinctually, that this was a dream. And in dreams, the most fearful acknowledgement is that you’ll never fall asleep – that makes all dreamers insomniacs. Hence, my newfound absence from my dream imagery can be compared to Lewis Carroll’s (who incidentally was the greatest insomniac according to Jweistein’s The Metaphysics of the Physically Improbable Authors, pg 416) absence beside Alice. In fact, Jweistein goes on to prove that Carroll had never existed and was just as fictitious as Alice. The original author (whose name does never appear in Jweistein’s discussion) had invented a character named Lewis Carroll as it sounded perfect for a novel that grew in dreams. Lewis Carroll was no pseudonym but a true genius of the actual author for it was a character that would keep growing even after the novel was complete, existing somewhere outside the book. “The characteristics of names authors shared like those of Thomas Paine, John Donne or G.K.Chesterton, Jorge Luis Borges (whose literary style I’m copying in this paragraph) should never have been suitable for a novel titled Alice in Wonderland, and therefore, the foremost character that the novel needed was an author whom the children would imagine as the teller of the tale. That name was Lewis Carroll.”

Jweistein’s analysis for the first time made me aware of the plight of an improbable author. Imagine a Lewis Carroll who does not exist in the real world; doesn’t exist in Alice’s virtual world. He could no longer be defined as real or fictitious. Nor can we term him as non-existent as his name appears on the very and every cover of Alice in Wonderland. Can you imagine the plight of someone whom you can’t see? Who can never tell you that he’s there – right in front of your eyes? And you keep on believing that he never existed? Or rather, you don’t know that you kept on believing that he never existed? Imagine a Lewis Carroll waving his hands at you, trying to get your attention, trying to tell you about Alice, about how his own words had eliminated him when you believed all along that he had become famous. Imagine a Lewis Carroll trying to get in your way, trying to stop you from walking away, away from your childhood, away from that imaginary world, away from yourself. But you pass right through him, gossiping, perhaps, with one of your friends.

Detachment: The coma of the awake. In my dream, I saw the room. And in the room, I saw myself. For the first few seconds I enjoyed this third person view incredibly. I could see, for instance, how my shoulders shrugged when I was in a casual conversation, how my eyebrows moved when I was trying to be over-expressive. But then, a fear overshadowed. Was this death? Do we see ourselves in dying, in places we’ve never been to? Is that the gift of demise? Is that the curse? Of losing control over my actions (for I was denominated to a mere spectator)? Of losing temporality? what exactly does existence mean to a physically improbable? Shall I be further disassociated? Or is death the final detachment? I was afraid, perhaps, because death is not sleeping forever, as people tend to believe but exactly the opposite – Death is being awake. Forever.

And in this terrible awakening, you’ll see enacted in front of your invisible eyes an imaginary tale concerning you, over which you shall have no control. For no one shall see you – your parents, your friends, your lover, your children or even, you yourself. You’ll be a silent spectator of imaginary lives.

That’s what I do. In this present imaginary moment of my life I watch myself walking with someone I could barely recognize through the garden. I see a man a few steps ahead calling me with his hands, saying something barely audible. And I see myself walking towards him. And then, in the most surprising of the imaginary moment, I see myself walking right through the man. That’s when I recognize his miswhispered words -

“Come back, sir. Buy a ticket to the wonderland. I’ll buy myself some bread with the money.”