My own private Narnia

So, do you believe in magic?

There are places that exist. Maybe they were real once, maybe they only live in the memories I have of them, selected, curated, gaps filled in with imagination and dreams, but who's to say what makes them any less real or false than objective, empirical reality?

There is a place like that I'm especially feeling tonight. A place of dreams, of wild imagination that  became reality before the eyes of their dreamers, came out into the real world and took shape and form, grew and flourished far beyond what they had hoped, beyond what they could have dared to believe.

Silicon Valley is a fascinating story, a myth made flesh, a world of games, stories, vivid, crazy, reckless, explosive magic. A place and time that changed the world. I showed us that you can dare to dream, and make new realities the way you wanted.

And yes, it comes with it's share of corruption, of cancer in it's bones and blood slowly blackening the golden sunshine with darkness and sleaze, with greed and lust and envy, a place where a thousand dreams died for every that lived...

But I'm not talking about the semiconductor factories, the garage inventors, the gamers and hackers and cyberspace architects and explorers, even the coders of the dotcom era or the VCs of the last decade past.

For me, it's always going to be a proof of concept, a place even in it's hard, expensive, gentrified avatar, with it's rents and commutes and affectations and cut-throat capitalism, it's still going to be a place where despite itself it can be a place where magic can happen. Maybe not the big, grand magics of overnight millions and free information and universal connectivity and equality, but small ones. Little things that are so huge compared to the realities of other places. Air, water, food. Interests. A chance to explore, to try. Stories and struggles. Not the destinations reached and prizes won, but a place full of the magic of trying, of running, of the journey.

And when you come out of the wardrobe back into your world, even as the past fades like a dream you cannot talk about, and you get back to the grind, you come back changed. You come back touched by the magic, fey, a little different, marked by a sunshine few understand. And even if you can never return - physically, temporally - you will always remember it as your own experience of it, not so much for what it was, but in what you felt there, what it did to you, how it made you feel. How it changed you.

And that's what makes it a magic place. Something that's yours alone, something unexplainable, intangible, yet so, so real.

My own private Narnia. 

Things are never just things

Clearing out a storage space is hard.
If you've been used to moving around, you already have a filter that ruthlessly throws away anything that's not needed any more, unless it has some use or sentimental value.
Things that get used, get used, wear out, get replaced.
But the ones that have an emotional connect - it's hard to see them again, because they're not just things, are they?
A little memory, a little piece of a life that once was.
A little moment in time, inconsequential but for the dreams that rode on its shoulders in the sun, laughing in delight at a bright and happy future they saw coming.
Now the moment lies still in it's bed of dust, crumpled plastic and yellowing paper, fading photographs and retro single... and dreams lie dead, incinerated in the nuclear blast of change, the hurricane winds of time. So destroyed they aren't even a memory anymore, except from the impression they left on these things.
A torn note from the back of a class book.
A receipt, a train ticket, a boarding pass, a membership card.
Things used till they were tattered and lovingly repaired.
Things pristine, never used at all, but bought on the wings of hopes and dreams, waiting expectantly in their sealed plastic covers.

Tiny little inconsequential things that can break you...

Perceived Realities

As I gradually come awake, I'm aware of the last fading remnant of my dream sliding away into oblivion; the tail end quickly glimpsed as it slithered away into the dark door, all that's left to remember the experience by...
Except 'glimpsed' isn't the right word.
It took a while to process, but I now realize why this dream had this strange yet familiar texture, falling between visual, symbolic, auditory, where meaning was there but the source felt so chimaeric...
I was dreaming in text.
I was dreaming in that mental state that translates letters on a page into image, sound and smell, without source and without engaging an awareness of the act of conscious reading.
Huh.
Explains a bit of how dreams can be so hard to remember... you're trying to reconstruct the act of reading, not recall.

On Bollywood

My relationship with Bollywood's been fairly interesting, I think. 

When I was growing up, Bollywood consisted of this blur of imagery and drama that would happen for a few hours in a week, maybe a Friday evening movie or a bunch of songs in Eastmancolor on a flickering, crackling, bulbous little CRT... but most of all, it was music. Music everywhere, on taxi cassette players, mikes on the corner, brassy, disjointed bands, and everywhere, radio. Single-channel MW bands on battery-powered transistors sitting in faraway corners, singing away in the background. Somehow, always associated with travelling, with holidays and memories, the comfort food of music. 

It's probably the nostalgia factor, but I guess also because I was most of the time too young to really get what was happening. 

Then sometime around Chunky Pandey, I got old enough to understand the stories... and hated them. And the music - however good it might be - was forever tainted from then on with shallow, selfish, misogynistic, boorish, and embarrassing behavior. 

But all that had come before - I think it's pretty much set the tone for what music should be, as far as I'm concerned. There has to be melody. Imagery. Erudition. The ability to paint a lifetime in a few charcoal strokes, just abstract enough to let you fill in the blanks with what you wanted the story to be. Soothing. Distantly on the edge of hearing, yet constantly there. Familiar enough so you can sing along. 

You don't know who's singing, who's composing, who did the music or what film it's from. It's like reading a comic from the middle of a series you found in a box of junk on a vacation afternoon when you had nothing to do. You don't know why they're singing. You don't have any visuals to go with them. 

All you know is - this is awesome. 

And I guess that's why there's always going to be that genre that exists only in my head - the soundtrack to those drives in the dark, the walks in dusty golden winter sunlight, browsing through second-hand bookstores... and sometime between KL Saigal and Baba Sehgal, a little golden RD-Rafi period that's can only be labelled 'the most awesome childhood ever'. 

Touched by a Dark Angel

I see Her sometimes out of the corner of my eye, a flitting dark shadow far away, right there in front of me, going about her work, and I always try to watch the expression on her face. She's sometimes absorbed, serious, curious... sometimes wistful, even compassionate... and sometimes there's a cool, unimaginably alien indifference as She shatters lives and breaks hearts, a remote blankness the ant sees on the oncoming car's wheel... 

We've never spoken, but I could swear She knows what I'm planning, exactly why I'm trying to stay just far away enough so She can't reach for me, but keeping Her close enough to watch, make sure She can't sneak up on me on one dark night, around a blind corner. So far She's mostly amused, not insulted... and why wouldn't She be? She's seen this before. So many billions of times before. The ways and means have varied, but in the end it's all come down to that moment, when the light fades on all the pleading, the tears, the fights, the pain. 
The moment when the light fades away into the silence. 

A baby and a middle-aged man, one a stranger, one the remotest acquaintance, yet...
One is dead, the other is dying, and behind each unknown face I see a familiar one looking out, through that tangle of hair, and is that a wink?

We've all been there, she whispers, done that. Give it your best shot. You're interesting. Maybe I'll give you a little chance. Just to see how far you get. I got the razor to your throat, the bead on your head, but... let's run, anyway. It's fun. 
And who knows?

She's looking directly at me now, like the few times before, and wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I can feel that glance, sliding in like an abstract icicle shard, a diamond-edged scalpel slicing through hopes, dreams, fears, desires, wants, plans, every resource I've saved and every defense I've built. Straight to the heart it goes, and stops, with the faintest single crystalline-cold tingle of a touch that reverberates through my life, then goes back, a little reminder of how close she can get, and how ephemeral the world and all I held close in it was, to begin with. 
A little reminder of how it can all end. Anytime. 
Anytime She wants. 

That's fine, I whisper back, I know you're there, but let's run anyway. It'll be fun. 

And her razor grin widens as her whipcord body relaxes, and - yet again - that tiniest nod. 
Go.

And we run. 

We run through traffic, through blaring horns, skidding rubber, and hurtling metal; we run through the billion, trillion little killer lives hanging in the air waiting to take root; we hurdle open manholes, dodge fizzing, spitting power lines, skate under crumbling, creaking edifices, and past dark alleys glinting with watching eyes and waiting steel. We run past claws, teeth, stings, and talons, we run through deserts, skate over thin ice, jump dark chasms, through freezing cold, open flame, and a witches' brew of poison, we run through night and dark as thunder growls in the building clouds... 

We parkour through that dazzling, dizzying obstacle course called Life and and I can still see Her, still here in the corner of my eye, effortlessly pacing me in the distance, and She's laughing in delight. 

And She's laughing because, no matter how tired, how damaged, how heartsick, I'm laughing too, and I will keep laughing till all the laughter runs out, into the silence at the end. 
But for now, this is the most awesome thing ever. 

And we run. 

between timelines

haunted by the ghost of a boy who never existed
stepped back a decade or two through the portal
everything changed
forget the family left behind
forget the son
he ceased to exist, never had been
as soon as I went. 

I'm haunted by the ghost of who I'd been
who I might have been
haunted by the future and past I killed

a moment of perfect clarity

I was driving - struggling - with the return traffic, an infinite vista of reddened brakelights stretching away on the highway, some RJ yammering away about potholes on the radio...
it faded.
I was... still there, in the car, but inside my head, looking out through my eyes... something apart, disengaged from the warm body actually at the wheel. I was looking around at the experiences stacked up around me, the shelves full of memories, and they all looked the same.
Standardized.
Day after day of the beach run, the mindless comedies, the commute and the work
Week after week of the movies, the malls, the grocery shopping
Month after month of the salary, the EMIs, credit card bills
Year after year of birthdays, appraisals

It's all the same. Nothing is changing anymore. All the files are the same size, sorted, categorized, tagged and labelled. Sometimes there are DVD folders with a neat index pasted to the spine.
As I walk down the passage, into the dimness and the dust, this changes. Now they're random, different colors, different sizes, stained, worn, crammed into piles.
And they're all stuffed to bursting. They're filled with photos, tickets, leaves, pebbles and sand, bottlecaps, napkins, handwritten notes, locks of hair, maps, lists, manuals... between the files there are books, comics, scratched CDs, ancient floppies, pizza boxes and balled-up t-shirts, wires trail between them and there are boxes filled with random, rusting junk. There are trophies, too; not the plaques and the framed certificates, but the scabs and the scars, bands and letters.

I turn around, and the road is exactly as I left it.
The newer shelves are silent, brightly lit and clean. The older ones crackle and buzz, drip and creak.

I want to stay here, but I can't see the road from here.
I can see my hands on the wheel. They're driving.
I pick up one, turn it to me. Fingers flex.

There is a decision hiding around the corner of reality, and the corner is close. I can hear it breathing.

Some more lucid-dreaming experiments

An interesting discovery - While I know that falling asleep in partial light triggers longer, more vivid and better-structured dreams (with correspondingly far high chances of taking control), it appears that the light needs to be present only at the point of falling asleep; yesterday's experience couldn't have been longer than half an hour, yet the memory lasted far longer. 

Which raises an interesting point - after the REM phase, what is the mind doing? Building dreams triggered off in the light-triggered REM? For the entire night? Or is the REM phase the start and finish of the dream, with the mind switched off for the rest of the time? That won't explain the intermeshing of the real world into dreams - like alarms, people shaking you awake, other noises that awaken you, or even the screaming nightmares at 3 AM (long after REM is done)... or are these cases of an REM phase restarting, or persisting? 

Needs more research. 

An interesting aside - videogames (or any kind of games) are naturally predisposed to be dream-matter because the subconscious recognizes the rules it plays by - and superimposes those rules, controls, and imagery (skins, if you will) in a manner that I guess is very similar to what the games themselves use - databases, scripts, CSS and skins. 

Last night, for instance - was a dream about what combination of tactics in my Dragon Age characters would work best in various combat situations. The healer at a distance, pumping up the fighters; the tank to distract unwelcome attention from the healer; the mage to target and incapacitate the bosses temporarily while the weaker enemies are disposed of, etc. And since a videogame is essentially an artificial-reality construct, it was a dream about a dream. 

And the game in question is about a main character who's been trapped in a lucid nightmare herself; so it's a dream of a dream of a dream. LOL. 

shaping dreams

not being figurative here.
had a nightmare last night that was actually disturbing enough to wake me up, and sit for a while with the light on. I could still feel it's aftereffects - the shadows, the dry whisper in my ear, that sense of gut-freezing terror...
Then I thought, if I find this so scary, I can use this.
So I wrote on it. Turned it into a fairly complete ghost story, with a central character, setting, mood, reasoning, logic.
And as I did it, I felt the terror melt away. Turn into a research project. I felt my mind catch hold of the darkness, twist it into a shape of my own choosing. Make it mine.
This was fun. Can't wait for the next one.
And yes... write a good final version. Soon.

gaining time

I've heard of people losing time for brief periods, looking at their watches and wondering where the last hour or two vanished, no memory of what they were doing.
Ever heard of anyone gaining time?
Happened to me today; looked at my watch, and had the extraordinary feeling that somehow, I've moved back in time. It should have been at least an hour and a half later than it was.
I'm scared. My mind either misinterpreted everything that had happened before that... or created incidents that never really happened.