Hello Human, how are you? Are you inside reality or are you travelling in a dream? Is the whole world transformed into a time machine and stuck in an irreversible nightmare? A nightmare where a microscopic organism designs the travel time and distance and the fuel measuring meter of the time machine always signals for refueling. Health scientists are trying to find a way out of the nightmare, working under life threatening conditions and irreversible surrounding pressures. People are not safe on the streets. Everybody is locked up inside their homes. How can the entire world face this transformation? It seems that the Earth has stopped rotating around the Sun. Everything has become stagnant suddenly, just like a fairy tale from our childhood. Back then these stories used to fascinate us, and we all wanted to enter the surreal world of stories and imageries. But now, there is no way out of it.

This situation reminds us of Rene Descartes’s evil demon or the evil genius who was immensely powerful and cunning. Descarte stated that with his power that Demon has employed all his energy to deceive him. Maybe it is true now, that a Demon is presenting a world of illusion to us.

This unprecedented Pandemic is just like a dream. An unending dream. That makes you feel restless and anxious. No matter how much you try to escape you cannot unless your pure consciousness comes back. Is this a real dream? If this is a dream, then it will come to an end very soon. Dreams are the manifestations of our subconscious & unconscious states of mind.

In this time travel, we are faced with a million dreams. So, if we are already in a big dream, then those million small dreams are inside the big dream. A dream within a dream. Ring a bell? Yes, Christopher Nolan’s Inception. In the film Inception, we see layered dreams. A dream within a dream within a dream. And if we look carefully, each of these dreams connects with reality on some level or the other. So, a dream is not a process disconnected from reality. Even in the hallmark film ‘Nayak’ by Satyajit Ray, we see the egoistic superstar dreaming about drowning in a stack of cash just like quicksand. This is one of the most acclaimed dream sequences in the history of film making and has also been discussed widely in the west. The point is here the director wanted to portray a shade of the protagonist’s character, aspirations, and way of life through two totally negative yet cinematically brilliant dream sequences. Also, we have seen the acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky continuously touch upon the areas of dreams and an alternative reality. Especially in ‘Black Swan’, it’s hard to differentiate between the real world and the surreal world. Now, a dream that we are watching is happening on a screen, which is again another virtual world. So, a person supposedly in the real world is watching a virtual world through another virtual world.

Yes, that is the level of non-linearity that defines us. What do we see? Only the reflection of light from the object we are looking at. The light from the object enters our eye and hits the retina, where the photoreceptors convert the light into electrical signals which are sent to the brain for the processing of the image. We never see the real object, hence it’s impossible for us to say how and why matter exists. In the same way, we have never seen ourselves, only a reflection. So possibly, we will never know how and why we exist. So, it’s like a dream, isn’t it?

We have spoken with many of our colleagues and friends for the last few months and came to know that they all are experiencing different kinds of dreams. To your surprise, some of us have discussed for hours regarding the nature of dreams, if there is any similarity between our dreams and so on. Please check whether you people are also having such dreams and do not forget to let us know, then we can have another few session showcasing the alternative realities. One of the very interesting dreams that we have discussed with our friends is just like a movie scene – one is sitting on a toilet seat and then when he is about to pull the flush, he is witnessing a fountain of blood inside but he is not being able to find the source from where the blood has come. Then he observes, blood oozing out from his little finger just like a fountain and he is not being able to stop it and then he wakes up. Another one dreamt of his near one’s death which is comparatively a common one that too in this pandemic situation. A few of our friends have seen that they are running madly after a train they do not want to miss, another one saw that she is not being able to answer any questions sitting in the examination hall. Another funny one is that a friend saw he has been kicked out of the house by his parents, which can happen with any of us at any time though! May be there is a continuous process of collective dreaming that is underway, may be the dreams are interacting with each other, influencing each other, and then manifesting in different forms. Who knows!

Dreams are nothing but the manifestation of our state of mind. It is difficult to understand one’s mental state. There are different layers and shades. Some parts of our mind remain in darkness and some parts are exposed to partial light. But that does not mean we can see and understand the part where the light falls. Our mind has its unique mechanism, its own way to deal with situations and life in general. It is more complicated than Moriarty, the villain from Sherlock’s story who made the detective search for answers and clues for years. We do not want the good dreams to end. We want them to continue. Dreams are what we live for. Without dreams, one cannot move forward. A positive dream consists of our hidden desires and wishes. Just like Mousumi Bhowmick’s incredibly famous and soul-touching song, ‘স্বপ্ন দেখবো বলে’, The song is a movement, a struggle that we all face in this journey of life. A song that reminds us that we have the right to live, to sing, to rise against all odds, and to dream of a better tomorrow. The legendary singer-songwriter Kabir Suman makes statements in his songs about equality, socialism, liberty and that is his dream for a better world. He says, “কাশ্মীরে আর শুনবে না কেউ গুলির শব্দ, আমি চাই মানুষের হাতে রাজনীতি হবে ভীষণ জব্দ”, Can you for once imagine Kashmir without a gunshot sound? No, we cannot. But that dream will be a reality and we must keep our dreams alive. No one even dreamt of a world with masks, but that is a reality now. So why shall we not dream of world peace? Why shall we not sing in Mr. Jackson’s tune, ‘We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving’, why can’t we do this? Why shall this be called a hallucination?

Hello Human, are you hallucinating? Or is your real-world and surrealist world diffusing into each other? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What is the future of this time travel? How does the destination sound like? Oozing of blood or chirping of birds? We’ll wait for your answer.

Copyright © Kothabriksha 2020, All Rights Reserved