Several nights ago, I had the most curious dream – where the curious part did not have much to do with the surreal imagery that most dreams are usually made up of. Instead, the thought process of my dream’s main protagonist: yours truly, was what was intriguing.
It was one of those dreams that keep sliding between being regular to nightmarish, from the normal to becoming riddled with anxious images and emotions. But the bit I most clearly remember about the dream is me walking to work on a Saturday morning, with a friend of mine (who passed away in 2008).
In the dream, I’m in a plain t-shirt and jeans, feeling like I used to in my 20s: ambitious and motivated – but without that stoic post-40 calm. Because, obviously.
I often dream about this friend; she and I were extremely close. Perhaps my mind has yet to accept her passing away. Nevertheless, in the dream we cross a busy area full of traffic and shops, and where lots of construction work is taking place.
We reach my office block; my friend's office is another ten minutes away. And on our way, I realise I am carrying a black backpack. This is strange because I have always hated backpacks. Even when I am travelling and am walking for hours, I refuse to carry one. So, I wonder what the backpack represented in my dream? A burden? A worrying thought? At that point in time, I did not know.
Bidding goodbye to my friend, and as I walk towards my office I come across a huge mound of rubble near a construction site. The sight saddens me because (in my dream) the rubble is of a shopping mall that has been torn down.
People often go about their daily lives with thoughts and behavioural patterns that are unconsciously driven by the constant fear of indiscriminate violence
As I walk towards my office, I decide to get a quick snack at the dhaaba outside my office. Given that there are no other dhaabas in this vicinity, it tends to get very crowded, very quickly. So, what should it be? Samosa? Biscuits? Or roti, saalan? I eye someone starting up a barbeque dishes. And as I move towards it, I suddenly realise that I do not have my backpack hanging from my shoulders anymore.
I panic.
Being chronically absent-minded with several thousand tabs simultaneously open in my mind, it’s the kind of rapid, quiet and non-vocal panic I feel when I forget my wallet, mobile phone, keys or whatever. This usually happens in situations where my mind is focused on thoughts that "come off" as more overwhelming and occupying than others; and these thoughts are rather trivial matters – if I may say so, myself.
In my dream, struck by the sudden realisation that I had misplaced my backpack, I quickly turn around and swiftly retrace and backtrack the path I had taken. On my way back, I remember that I had put my backpack near the rubble (while mourning the demolished shopping mall).
As I urgently walk back towards the rubble, I am completely convinced that in such a congested area, someone must have already run away with the bag.
Now, here comes the most intriguing part of the dream:
To counter the thought of someone running away with my mistakenly abandoned backpack, I begin to hope and pray that nobody would have gone near it, assuming it to be a suspicious, unattended backpack, containing a pretimed explosive device.
In a sense, I was counting on the fear of getting caught up in an indiscriminating, mass act of violence to become a deterrent of sorts, stopping someone from picking up my backpack.
I reach the area and there it was, sitting under the ugly shadow of the rubble. But near my bag, stood a woman in a white kurta shalwar, dupatta, attar, tasbih and all. She sees me approaching the bag and just as I am about to pick it up, she tells me: “Iss mein toh sirf kitaben hain,” (But there are just books in it). She sounds almost disappointed and that is exactly when and where I woke up.
The waking up bit had not left the dream midway – as though, stranded like a nerve-wrecking cliff-hanger; hence, there was no lingering anxiety at my end. In having found my backpack, the dream seemed to have resolved whatever apprehension that I might have been feeling before I went to sleep.
Question, though.
Why and how would my mind use one fear as a tool to reason out and offset another fear?
Meaning: in my dream I hoped that the fear of mass destruction would deter someone from committing a petty theft. Was this how my mind was dealing with the anxiety of losing something that I was afraid of losing — using the thought of one kind of fear to negate the thought of another?
But who was the woman? She must have checked my backpack to know that there were "just" books in it. Was she a potential thief, who was obviously not afraid of approaching an unattended backpack lying atop a heap of rubble in a congested area of the city? Or alternatively, she was the manifestation of what my mind was attempting: using one fear to curb the anxiety from another fear.
Thought: Is that how people exist now – their survival depending upon how we navigate through various sets of fears?
But maybe this dream was a way for my subconscious mind to connect to what my conscious mind often thinks about. Something like: what makes people repress the fear of bad stuff (street crime, gun violence, natural disasters, abuse) with a kind of reasoning that sees these things as stuff that happens to other people; or as something that has a solid justification behind its devastating intent.
What intrigued me most, though, was how in my dream a global reality (terrorism) became linked to a personal issue – somewhat trivial, at best. The conclusion then being that things like extremist violence and terror is an extended area of our immediate concerns. And people often go about their daily lives with thoughts and behavioural patterns that are unconsciously driven by the constant fear of indiscriminate violence. Which should also explain why we say what we say.