I have had a fair share of good peaceful nights. These are times when the body and mind tired from the abuse of the day find its solace in the bed of night.I remember my grandma's tales of heroism and valour of kings as well as the beauty of queens. She was not an educated lady but through her folklore of yore,
she imbibed in all us siblings the virtues of righteousness and spirit of survival. And how well I slept hearing this. As she patted on my head singingsongs which she learnt as a child, I passed from the realms of reality to the world of dreams where for me everything was possible.I was in a world filled with magical creatures, centaurs and unicorns.There were mermaids,nymphs and gods. I miss all of that now.
As times have changed, so has sadly my ability to pass peacefully into the world of dreams. Every day I take into myself something which takes away from me the beauty of the transition which my grandmother gently put me through. The "something" can be terrorist blowing up bombs, rapes of children, apathy of life and the bias that the world puts us through every day. AS my generation gets loaded with the data that is being blindly subjected to, my mind cleverly filters the larger picture removing the tiny details. It is these tiny details that I come to face in my dreams.And certainly, some of them turn into nightmares. As a child,I used to wake up in sweat when such nightmares came to me in the middle of night. And my grandmother calmly woke up, fetched me a glass of water and patted me back to sleep. I have no patting now. I face the terrors of the minute details as a lone warrior. As my peaceful sleep ends in nightmare and possibly brings me back to reality with my throat parched, I sit sipping the glass of water. Is this generation condemned to
few hours of sleep? We all share the same problem and the same worries. I share the history of sleep with the ancient men. They must have had their share of worries but they had the will to sleep peacefully. It is this will that is ebbing away from me nowadays. Many people boast about the lesser number of hours they sleep or the hours they burn the oil lamp for. As we hide behind excuses of movies, tv shows and sacrifice our sleep, will we be punished for the laying on the altar one of the most basic ingredient of our life? I think we all know the answer for that. As I put an end to my tale of woe after waking from a nightmare, I am reminded of the title of a beautiful poem "A Dream within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe. I hope I am in just in a dream within a dream and waiting to be patted back to sleep.
