With Night and Darkness

I am not afraid of the dark because with darkness comes dreams...

Many before me have wondered the secret behind dreams and though any logical explanation is immaterial to the context, I would go with the popular belief that dreams are nothing but our innermost fears, our utmost desires and passions. Dreams are our own reflection in a very dusty mirror where even we didn’t dare look before. Dreams sometimes can be a way into the future or a reminder of the past and sometimes the horrors of present. And how we all love to live in these mirage of whirling emotions called dreams.

One such dark...

I flew across the deserts and saw life originating from sand. I travelled across the oceans to watch mermaids singing songs of love. I traversed continents with no borders. I was a spirit travelling the temples of India, mosques of Arabia and cathedrals in Italy. I talked to Buddha and listened to Krishna as they told me how beautiful the world is and how wonderful its creations are and that’s when, in a world of free will, I realized I was a writer.

I filled papers with black inks writing stories no-one read, poems none understood and words that haunted me all the time. I wrote about people I knew would hate me some day. I wrote about animals who I knew did not care. And I wrote about myself when I knew I will be dead in another few years. And still I wrote, pages after pages like a crazy person who got happiness in scribbling and tearing paper after paper. But tonight was different somehow, may be because it was a dark night or may be because I had finally discovered why I felt this crazy happiness.
 

And so with a smile, I looked around me and saw...I saw a world full of hope, a world where energy buzzed in the air like siren, a place where love prevailed, an impossible land where trees spoke words of wisdom to each other and wind sang melodies unheard. I saw a world free of pollution and untouched by corruption. I saw children playing in the mud, women saying prayer for the family and men returning home with hard-earned bread. And all these humans habiting this world had one precious gift – courage; courage to make dreams come true; and I knew that all those Gods who spoke to me were right. This world was indeed a beautiful place.

I saw my own house. I saw my reflection in the mirror which mercifully showed me sleeping peacefully. I went towards my study. I saw all the books I had collected over the years. Paper-backs and hard-backs of all dimensions, witness to the huge knowledge man-kind possessed and still lacked. I saw a small shelf with books written by me. I could see my name etched on every book in gold letters. But I was looking for one particular book I had written when I was still young. It was a book on dreams. It said something I couldn’t really remember now. I saw it stacked neatly in the middle. I picked it up. There it was, written right there on the first page. I touched those words and felt happiest beyond anything because these were my words – “Dreams are born in the night just to die in the morning. So in some ways dreams are just - born to be dead”

That’s when I woke up and continued being an engineer......and dreamt again and again of being a writer.