vivid dreams

I love stories like Lord of the Rings. Long arduous adventurous journeys, with a ragtag group of people, amazing landscapes and occasional adrenaline rushes. And I love when I go on such adventures in dreams, feeling like being in such journeys for ages. 

Of late sleep is disturbed and I get into limbo states where I am between sleep and state of wakefulness and remember the last bit of the dream. I am dreaming of apocalyptic worlds these days. Other day it was that the world is flooding and I am watching a building getting reconfigured by the flood that is lashing against it. 

I read in bed for some time before sleeping. Following this practice of fiction at night which helps to escape, from the days worries, into some other imaginary world. Non fiction in the morning, which helps to set the mind in analytical or contemplative mode and prepare to face the day. Other day, the dream had a bicycle prominently featured which now I know was from the book I was reading. Books simulate mental imagery more sharply since we created that ourselves in our mind from the script, than watching movies before sleep where images are someone else’s. 

Yesterday's episode in the limbo state was this. I am getting out of a house, presumably to go to a store. A cat (his size seems bigger, but I don't seem to be bothered) is lying outside and I ask him if he is coming with me. He ignores me. I ask again, seems he walks with me normally (I guess cats don't do this kind of thing, accompanying someone on a store trip, I didn't have such experience before, in this dream I seem to have memory of it and I seem to like the fact that he accompanies me normally). I give up and walk out and see a family of three. I seem to know them and that they are on vacation from a foreign country. The mother asks one of the kids if she wants to accompany me, for old times sake. I seem to have affection for one of the kids, presumably I have memory of playing with her earlier and i feel the affection and give her a squeeze. Now it seems there is some distance that must have crept up as the kid is growing up and like some of the American malayali kids, she is a bit aloof. But she agrees to walk with me and we set on it. I must have fallen back into deeper sleep after that. 

Now I realize some connection with The Last of Us (Disney+ Hotstar), a series that I loved last year - a post pandemic world where the human race was largely eradicated by fungi infections and the remaining people are sequestered into few places and a man and a kid sets up on a long arduous journey. Liked Pedro Pascal’s character as a reserved father figure and Bella Ramsey as the kid was awesome. 

I get the cat too. There is a heavily pregnant cat that sits on the same spot as I walk out of the house to the car. Other day i asked her “enjuva” (“what is it?”) in a tone that no one outside the family would imagine I would say. I caught myself as I was entering the car as to why I used the tone that I had used only with Chakki when she was little. She is the only child I had ever played with in my life as I treat all other kids formally like they are full human beings and I am not able to become playful with them, but luckily didn’t have any such inhibitions with Chakki. The cat usually ignores me, in the way cats can only do in their languid, disinterested way, occasionally meowing at me something which I don’t understand.