...just a dream

Continued from the last post. Please read this before you proceed.

“But that was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream…” Michael Stipe would’ve crooned. And I would not have bothered either, if it hadn’t happened the way it did.

Though it faded out smoothly, the waking was sudden, not the sit-up-sweating-sudden, but the eyes-wide-open-and-completely-alert-sudden, immediately reminding of that scene from The Matrix where Neo wakes in his room, after the night at the party where he “followed the white rabbit”. Was very similar to how the loud music at the party perfectly leads into the alarm clock sound.

The last thing I can remember is going to sleep in this train that I’m travelling from Bengaluru to Mumbai in. Mind you, I did not fall asleep in the middle of anything. Distinctly remember putting all my things- the valet, mobile phone, digital camera, headphones, everything away in safe places and then going to sleep. But when I woke up, everything except the valet was simply lying between me and the wall of the berth. And the valet was placed on my chest! As if to return something after some sinister business has been completed, and explicitly warn the victim. Like a decapitated pet.

Checked everything thoroughly, nothing was missing. Maybe it’s nothing, but if IT WAS YOU, TURN YOURSELF IN. NOW!

Based on a true incident...

This really happened, so visualize it in first person.

You’re in a room. A regular-size rectangular room. It has 2 doors at opposite ends of the longer dimension. Through both these doors you can goto other very similar rooms, only they’re perpendicular to this one, extending on opposite sides. Forming like an “S” or “5” on the 7-segment calculator display with the top and bottom horizontal lines missing. That’s it. No way of getting outside of these three rooms. How did you get here? Don’t really know, but fact is, it doesn’t matter now!

You’re done exploring, and are in the central room. There’s nothing in any of these rooms, nothing to do, nothing to do anything with, just nothing! But there’re two women you don’t recognize, dressed in lawyer-like suits.

Somehow you start understanding the place, ancient lore, a hunch, don’t know how, but now you know a little about it. As long as nothing happens, nothing happens. But when the time comes, something does happen. Each room has its own story, a particular phenomenon going for it, its own method of killing its inhabitants. One is supposed to fill up with some poisonous gas, other with water, and the third with vacuum. Each room gets “activated” at random times and stays that way for a random duration, and you simply move yourself to one of the “safe” ones. Nothing to worry about, just some rules of the game that you’ve found your way around.

After sometime, you’re in one of the safe rooms, and suddenly it gets “activated” and you notice that the unsafe one hasn’t “deactivated” yet. Yup, two randoms do sometimes overlap! There’s still one safe room, but now you begin to panic. If two random series can overlap, so can three. You told yourself these things were random, but fact is you don’t know the pattern yet. Just because you didn’t pay a lot of attention, because you were busy being “new to the game” doesn’t mean it’s random. Nothing is random. There’s always a well-defined rule; however complex. So, you try to make sense, and find a pattern that’ll help predict this. But wait. How’s that going to help? Knowing when you’ll run out of choices doesn’t improve the situation. Instead concentrate on finding a way out.

So from now on whichever room you’re in, you closely inspect its each and every surface, for any hints of a way out. This goes on for a very long time. You can’t find a way out, and the ladies aren’t helping either. They just follow, because they’re just as clueless. Then you accept it, you’re stuck.

It’s just a matter of time. All you can do is wait, for when three random series overlap, there’s no place you can go to. Try to imagine the situation. You’ll be in one of the safe rooms, and it’ll get “activated”, while the other rooms are still “unsafe”. You should probably hold your breath and run and stand at the junction of the other two rooms, so that when one of them “deactivates” you can hop onto that one. Yeah, that, for the time being, is the best strategy. But wait! What if the last safe one gets deactivated before these two? Well, it is possible, you see. Randomness is a queer beast. Heck, screw it! So you play along, running listlessly from one room to another.

Then as you’ve been expecting, it happens. You’re in one of the side rooms, and all three are unsafe. You don’t know what to do so you decide to run to the junction between the other two rooms, feeling lucky it didn’t happen while you were in the central room, how would you have found the junction between the two side ones! With held breath, you’re running through the central room, but you overshoot, damn! Turn around and get back to the junction. Hey wait, you just saw a door at the end of the other side room, but can’t see it now. Was that a hallucination? Hanging between renewed hope and disbelief, you decide such great an opportunity shouldn’t be dismissed. Though it seems far-fetched that you hadn’t noticed it, a whole open door!, for so long, you step back into this side room, and see in the opposite direction, and there you see it again! Ditching all reason, you make a mad dash for the door. Once you’re through the first junction, the door isn’t visible anymore, but you still keep going. All through the length of the central room, the other junction, and the breadth of the other side room, you can only see a wall, but you don’t stop, because you know you saw a door there, and now you want to believe it, because it is your only way out. As you reach the wall, you close your eyes, and just let the momentum take you. You feel no resistance, no wall, no push from the front, but instead a pull from behind. The wall should’ve passed by now, so you open your eyes. It’s very dark here.

At this point, as if due to the momentum, the viewpoint gets ejected from the body, and changes from first person to third person, and you’re looking at yourself from the front, and you can see that the wall is now behind you. Your body, fighting between the accumulated momentum and the pull from behind, keeps moving in the same direction for some more time. But now you see that the wall that you just came through is, in reality, the roof of a building. Gravity starts acting in a new direction and this is why your body was feeling the pull from behind, and this new direction is the one you have to follow now. So the momentum you acquired from running is actually getting you higher and is slowly decreasing. At this point, you twist your body, in such a way as to land on your two feet, maybe just at the edge of the building. The viewpoint continues to move away, and you see yourself, dressed in a smart funky suit, balancing in one corner of the building. There’s some smooth dance music playing in the background, and the two women are on two other corners. They’re no longer dressed like they were, but in a very party-dress. The viewpoint moves further away, like a helicopter-view, with music fading-out, and the surroundings become visible. It is very city-like with a few high-rises, and many just like the one you’re standing on. All buildings bearing arrays of happily-lit windows, but none will give away the laws that govern life within, and yet they do, each one of them. Fade to black.