Waking up when dreams end

The thought stream is peculiar. It seems to make its presence felt at the oddest of times –When I’m asleep, having a face to face conversation with someone, in the shower, a movie theatre… Basically, places where I can’t make a note of things. Today, I woke up at 3 AM, remembering something. My dream journal.

Yes. I kept one when I was 8 because it bugged me to not recollect my dreams, for I was not the master of my mind. I didn’t know a character called Sheldon Cooper would exist during my time; but I thoroughly empathise with him when he does the face twitch, for that is exactly how I felt when I didn’t remember something.

In this journal, I would make a note of things that appeared in my dreamscape that I wanted to remember the next morning so I could quip into the dream discussions my peers had. When my mother found the journal with pictures unevenly torn from supplements that she thought the paperboy had been stealing and scribbles with words and spellings I’d asked of her, she had smiled, but hid it anyway. And today, when I ask her about it, she still maintains that she was worried about me becoming an insomniac, with a face twitch she does only when she lies.

On not finding it, I began to write where I could find place. Yes, on walls too. My grandparents believed I was having ‘bad’ dreams and they were quite convinced I was seeing things. They would promptly take me to a temple to obtain sacred amulets that they understood was sufficient to keep the supposed evil at bay.

I had found it years ago. Today, as I opened it, the familiarity struck me – The little square book with red and blue ruled lines, the cursive font, touching the top and bottom line, precisely. There were things in there about the mystery of the tooth fairy that had appeared in cartoons but never in my Indian home, the letter from Hogwarts I was expecting to get when I turned 11, about free falling, having trouble dealing with the fact that Captain Planet was fictional, of secretly watching MTV, about chasing numbers and so on.

At that point in time, I had no idea I was doing the following: Something that is today termed ‘Lucid dreaming’, letting my imagination run wild (which is exactly what I needed to do right now,) Keeping a journal and actually, writing.