Shreya Sen-Handley | Dream time... What If They Come True?

Watching cricket with Dream Team emblazoned across Indian players’ chests had me mulling over all that the word ‘dream’ promises. When something is “a dream” or “dreamy”, it’s wonderful, marvellous, and beyond our wildest expectations! Dream in this context is aspiration, the sort you strive to realise, and not the type that traipse across our sleeping brains at night. But what if they were the latter kind? What if we pursued the chimera of our unconscious minds, causing them to actualise?

Yikes! I certainly wouldn’t want MY dreams — the ones sprung from my subconscious — coming alive! And the why resides in their outlandishness — read on and you’ll see.

Amidst the flurry of positive and negative publicity for the new Fennell-flecked Wuthering Heights film, which I gather is icky, inherently racist, and nothing like the OG, Jacob Elordi, its Heathcliff, suddenly loomed in my dream. No, not that type of dream, thankfully, his cartoonishly-exaggerated chin reminding me of hoes and spades. There he was, nevertheless, dominating my kitchen with demands for cookies from a high shelf. Like Cookie Monster but not half as sweet! I suggested he get it himself, three feet taller than me as he is, but he imperiously insisted on my fetching it for him.

If the noise around this new movie explained its perch in my brain, nothing can account for the dream that succeeded it. Pleasantly middle-aged Phyllis from the sitcom The Office turned up in a voluminous wedding gown, to warn us that “Charles” was sick. “King Charles?” we scratched our heads. At which, she stridently upbraided us, wildly out of character and Bridezilla-esque, for our “indifference”, leaving us as confused as at her entrance.

Only two of the legions that march across my nocturnal consciousness, these discomfiting dreams that you wouldn’t want apparating, are too unthreatening to be conferred the status of nightmares. Though the term ‘nightmare’ is muddled anyway, springing from Middle-English anxiety about demonic females getting comfy on reclining chests (funny too, isn’t it, or maybe just misogynist, that dream interpretations even in the 20th century revolved around the quiet power of women), and nothing at all to do with horses, neither apocalyptic nor partying.

These eccentric nighttime visitations then certainly merit their own name. Yet, what should we call these visions that slip into the cracks between dreams and nightmares? Keeping it horsey still, which is the least we can do for our much-put-upon (literally) equine friends, shall we anoint these oddball episodes ‘drightmares’? Or, perhaps, ‘neighms’? Or anything pithy you want to send in.

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty — the states of mind that must produce these — allow me to regale you with one of the most absurd ‘neighms’ of my experience! I once dreamt that Sonia Gandhi’s phone number had been passed on to me, which is not the absurd part since I was a journalist, in the midst of covering the 1998 elections with the late, great Mark Tully. A probable series of digits had wafted through my head, which I tried to recapture and ring on waking, to find myself talking to a tarot card reader in Kolkata’s back lanes. Though nothing they said featured in our election predictions, or transpired in the real world, wasn’t it freaky as fudge?

My dreams reveal nothing about Elordi, The Office, or Indian elections but a lot about me, I fancy, as yours do about you. What does it say about my brain that I remember them so vividly? That I suffer from a profound lack of sleep? Which is indeed true, not having slept properly since I became a mother nearly two decades ago.

How I envy those who cannot recall their dreams, my husband amongst them; never resembling one who’d been dragged through the bristling green hedgerows of the English countryside upon waking! Not just looking the part but feeling as frazzled, no matter how innocuous the dream, because the rest you seek for your body and mind when you retire at night, has clearly eluded you. That I remember so much of my sleeping brain’s activities, could also hint at a robust memory. But my retention of waking incidents is quite weak, nowadays at least, making it stranger still.

Receiving such peculiar nocturnal tidings must disclose much else about my personality. Running the above ‘neighms’, for example, through amateur psychoanalysis could yield the following interpretation: that the entitlement of the privileged has been weighing upon my mind. I do have a social conscience, I confess, and worry about the terrible world we’re leaving our children, but I must also admit to dearly loving sweets. So, maybe, all that my subconscious was telling me, in the first instance, was that somewhere in my kitchen was a forgotten box of bickies, and nothing more noble!

The dream about the illness of someone called Charles was most likely symbolic of a currently ailing Britain (though why an American comic was the message-bearer beats me). You might tell me, however, that my topsy-turvy-weird-and-wonky drightmares point, not to a troubled social conscience, but a psyche in turmoil, and that I should take myself to a therapist post-haste!

But the former work just as well, you’ll find, when used as grist for the mill. Providing fodder for my books and columns, which number in the hundreds, as well as for the thousands of entertaining tales I tell family and friends, they’ve kept me winding along life’s path, mad as a March hare and as bouncy!