The Power of Stories: Phantasms & Fantasies III
Content Warning: Nightmares, Violence, Horror
The brain is designed to make sense of partial data. That is how we are able to complete sentences even when parts of them are missing. What’s creative is when the brain sees meaning in random patterns. Shapes in clouds. An evil elf in the formation of the petals of a pretty flower. Dragons and people in the cracks and lines of the bathroom tiles… This is also the reason why a friend saw a headless ghost in the white shirt hanging on the clothesline in the dark of the night. :D
There is also imagination. I allow mine to run riot. When I was younger, I could look into the mirror and terrify myself by imagining there was an actual other, scarier ‘me’ on the other side of the glass! :D This was the time when friends delighted in relating stories from the Ramsay Brothers’ and other horror movies. I didn’t watch a single one but my imagination worked over time in filling in the gap. I’m still left with images of hands emerging from the wall behind. Of hair growing out of a portrait sinisterly to strangle someone. Of hearing a sound in the night and being too scared to open your eyes. What if there’s something terrifying glaring at you or worse, behind you. :D
Funnily, I managed to scare someone other than myself once. That was the time when I had hip-length, wavy hair that had a tendency to explode when washed. (It took two days to mollify it and get it to recover from the shock of getting wet! By when, it was time to wash it again! :D) So, there I was with my hair, wet and loose, chatting with a couple of friends as evening turned to dusk. I was grinning at something one of them said when the other blurted, “Don’t smile so. It’s scary!” I was flummoxed. Then I realized that all she could see in the waning light of the day were my teeth, eyes and billowing hair. :D
Then there was a movie-like nightmare I had, set in broad daylight. For some reason I was wearing a pale pink salwar kurta in the style of the 1960s. (Those kurtas were so tight they had to be sewed on after the heroine wore them. Don’t know how they could walk.) Anyway, I am seated on one corner of a long sofa, with my legs curled up, reading a book. There’s a window in front of me from where a gun appears, pointed right at me. (Now that I think of it, watching the Hindi movie 100 Days might have had something to do with this nightmare. Though this one merrily took off in another direction!)
The next thing I know the gun shoots 17 bullets into my stomach sending me flying. Yeah, just like those movies where a kick sends you airborne, defying all common sense and most importantly, gravity. But 17 bullets! Either the shooter was inept or didn’t understand the capacity for survival of a human body. My dreaming mind didn’t understand it either. For I felt excruciating pain each time a bullet punched through. The pain was so bad that it woke me up in the middle of the night, sweat pouring in rivulets down my head. I actually patted my stomach to check for bullet holes! :P Reassured it was a dream I went back to sleep. Not so reassuringly the dream rolled its eyes at me and continued right where it had left off.
For the next thing I know, I’m coming out of a doctor’s clinic (yeah, I’m still alive! The miracle!) with stitches crisscrossing my tummy. Presumably, the miracle doctor extracted all 17 bullets and sewed me up. But this is a nightmare so there’s no place for miracles… unless it’s the bizarre kind. Because the moment I step into an alley (again, in broad daylight) the assassin steps in to knife me right where I’d been shot. That begs the question... with my nightmare bent on relentlessly attacking me in such an over-the-top manner, what possible message could my brain be sending me?
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