The Dreamer's Misfortune

The time is 3 A.M AND I'm lying in my bed with my eyes open, starting at the ceiling with a blank look on my face. It’s cold and a weather in which people would like to pull their blankets up to their ears and snuggle back to sleep. But I’m just not able to. The dreamer’s misfortune.

It happens all the time. While I’m travelling, sleeping, working or maybe sitting plain jobless. Words, phrases, snippets, verses, sentences sometimes whole ideas come flooding into the mind. A cacophony, humming and buzzing in the ear, like a pesky mosquito that just won’t leave. All it wants is just a place to rest in my ear and hope they can make it to my brain in due time. And the problem is that I just can’t let them go or block it out. I love it when it strikes me like a sudden inspiration. A bolt from the blue. I love to note it down from time to time on whatever I can get my hands on. These days, thanks to my mobile phone, I just put them into the memos and save it and come back to it later. Some of them make it here as blog posts, some into the blog drafts some will still be there in my mobile and a few unfortunate ones will be lost in the folds of my brain and might rear up its head again later. I don’t know if this particular phenomenon/situation/scenario has a name but let's see if it hits me.

Though I like it, it becomes most inconvenient when it strikes in the middle of the night. After a tiring day when all you want to do is sleep and it wakes you up in the middle of the night. It’s like the mind receives an S.M.S. "1 idea received" and the menu shows "read" and "cancel". Try as hard as I may, I just can’t press the "cancel" button. And then starts the flood of SMS’s (read ideas) which won’t let you sleep. It might be the influence of the latest movie you saw or might be the song you were crooning all day or a discussion with a friend or something that was in the papers or might even be something totally disconnected like a blast from the past. And then the mind will put on wings and take you out for a flight of fantasy. It might think up a storyline which can be made into a beautiful movie and then gives way to a very well thought out plan that will be swiftly replaced by something else. It’s a self-minded cycle and it just won’t let me sleep. But one thing it does is that it takes the mind away from the hideous reality, even for a moment, and puts in its place a, let’s say, pauper-to-price story. And on rare occasions, some incidents take you to another part of your dream which is actually real, and it's so vivid that it is better than you can fantasize or dream of. It's the moments like these that you live for. And hope that they keep coming to you from time to time… Because it gives a new perspective to a lot of things around… Because they make me feel alive…

They come... They go... And they come again... And the cycle repeats... Sometimes all I want to do is shout at it to stop. But I won’t... I just can't... :)