The power of stories—phantasms & fantasies: P3

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 shape of the petals of a pretty flower, dragons and people in the cracks and lines on 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 allowed 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—of hands emerging from the wall behind, of hair growing out of a portrait sinisterly, of hearing a sound in the night and being too scared to open your eyes fearing something evil glaring right back 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 hair with a tendency to explode when washed. (It took two days to mollify it and get it to recover from the shock of getting wet! :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 and then I realized that all she could see in the waning light of the day were my teeth, eyes and billowing hair. :D

And 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. (You know, those with kurtas so tight that they were sewed after you wore them, ensuring you could barely 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 and 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 takes off in another direction!)

The next thing I know the gun shoots 17 bullets into my stomach sending me flying to land on the floor at the other end of the sofa, as if I was in those movies where a kick sends you flying, defying all common sense and most importantly, gravity. But 17 bullets! Either the shooter was inept, dumb 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 I woke up in the middle of the night, sweat pouring rivulets down my head, to check my stomach 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, though with some bad editing.

Image Courtesy: <a href='https://www.freepik.com/vectors/hand'>Hand vector created by dgim-studio - www.freepik.com</a>

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. And this time… I stayed dead. :D Or so I imagine, because after I woke to check the awful pain and was satisfied there were no gaping holes, when I went back to sleep the nightmare was done with me. :P That begs the question... with my nightmare bent on relentlessly killing me in such an over-the-top manner, what possible message could my brain be sending me?