Skip to main content

My Nightmares


Nightmares abound in my sleeps. They are all very similar too like the sheep in a flock. Their fidelity to one theme used to disturb me. Not any more, because I have accepted them as my lifelong companions. Moreover, their frequency has declined considerably.

Some mysterious but friendly person persuades me to go on a journey and takes me along strange yet familiar landscapes. Rugged mountains with turbulent rivers. Initially the place looks familiar, like Shillong where I lived the most painful years of my life. Eventually, however, the place assumes fiendish shades and undertones. There are people and they don’t seem to notice me. Yet they look menacing indirectly as if they are lying in ambush just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on me. The person who brought me here has vanished. I walk alone with inimical forces all around. There is no harm done to me but the threat is always looming all around. Sometimes I am caught in a labyrinth on the mountain. Sometimes it’s a labyrinthine mansion which always reminds me of some Catholic seminaries. Do the menacing figures in my nightmares wear white cassocks? That question arises in my consciousness after each nightmare.  

I have longed for sweet dreams. They evade me. Mercifully, my reality is better than my dreams.

What strikes me most is the element of betrayal in my nightmares. The bizarre terrains and the detached hatred on faces don’t terrify me as much as the betrayal by the person who initiates my journeys into the alien landscapes.  

I experienced much betrayal in my life, especially in Shillong. In fact, Shillong sucked out my trust in people with all those betrayals. I have lived a relatively solitary life ever since leaving that hill town. But the town continues to haunt my sleeps.

Science tells me that there is something called ‘hidden memory.’ That is the place where we send our stressful, traumatic or fear-related memories. This is a kind of self-protection mechanism. But these memories don’t peter out eventually. I guess, they keep coming back in our nightmares.

I have made friends with my nightmares, so to say. I know how they are going to be. I accept them with humility and resignation. Sometimes I even feel that I should be grateful for all the trekking I get in my dreams. 


PS. Written for Indispire Edition 430: Do your dreams/nightmares have a common theme? Write about the theme or lack of it.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    There was a time when my night times were active like this (good, bad, indifferent) but these days I don't recall any dreams. No doubt they are there, but they refuse to remain on the opening of the eyes... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...