Mind does weird things. And contrary to popular belief , I too am gifted with one. Moreover, it is functional, albeit in all sorts of crazy manner. It might be just as primitive as that of a  Neanderthal or heck! even a chimp for all I care, yet the kind of things it can come up with are real beauties! The most fascinating of them all is the arbit dreams I keep having, sometimes with certain thoughts connecting so elegantly, they leave me surprised and often with answers to some of the many turmoil raging through my mind. While at other times, it is just what it is – a bizarre dream.

During one of my late morning slumbers, which had been quite frequent of late, owing to the grilling badminton coaching sessions that saw me waking up at all ungodly hours, I had this fantastic dream – a melange of luck and adventure with an amazing comic timing. As is with most such fantasies, I now remember only bits and pieces of the thrilling escapade:

I, along with a couple of my friends were riding in a delivery van over a bridge. Along came a lion, running abreast our modest transport. Now this was all just a dream, nevertheless a lion sprinting along one’s van sure feels out of place anywhere on earth! Anyway, as luck would have it, the engine started sputtering soon like an asthmatic patient (it too got shit-scared like us probably!) and died somewhere in the middle of the bridge. The icing on the cake was the missing part of a better half of that bridge. I don’t know why that worried me – I couldn’t have hoped to outrun the lion anyway. Before long, we were standing on the edge of the jagged ends of the incomplete bridge looking down, way down, into what felt like sure death – a vast… ocean! This was kind of unnerving considering that bridges across rivers and canals were more heard of and would have been more helpful eventually. Still, it’s my dream – I can dream a canal, a river or a Milky Way; and we are not arguing over the possibilities of that happening. Given the gravity of the situation, we arrived at the decision of jumping off the edge almost instantly. Probably, the prospect of finishing off our lives with a huge leap of faith was far appealing than getting mauled and mutilated to death by that lion.

There was an obscenely long interval between the moment my feet left the terra-firma and the splash! The racing of thoughts were like the flickering of the celluloid frames of the days of yore – erratic, blurry and yet revealing. Oddly enough I found another set of my friends airborne – a squealing assortment hitched to a Para-sail. With a flurry of frantic gestures and incomprehensible screaming, they tried to encourage me to grab the sail, not a very easy task considering that they were metres away from me and I was falling down faster than a lump of lead. The ocean surface was rising up to meet me at a mind-numbing speed, and I waited for that sickening crunch against the impenetrable wall. There was no panic; just an acceptance of my bleak chances of making it alive through this. It was peaceful – survival seemed inconsequential – though somewhere in my heart I still wished for it more than death. Amidst those numerous heartbeats of black-outs, all that remained was a wonder of how this all might end… Splash!

I hit the water surface and was consumed in the raging torrent of air and liquid. A mild panic struck me – what if I never make it to the surface! – an experience that has always stuck with me, undiminished through all the many occasions I had of diving in pools. Time elapsed… seconds, minutes, an eternity. When my head did break through the surface, the breath came in huge gasps. I caught a glimpse of the Para-sail and my friends breaking loose from the floating canvas, before I was swallowed back into the ocean that treated me with all the gentleness of a tempest. Desperately I swam across, to the group huddled together, caught by intermittent fear of the creatures that might be roaming the abyss beneath me. I reached them unscathed, and so did the rest of my mates who had jumped off the bridge. Later, I found us all drying ourselves in a dark recess partly filled by foaming water. As the excitement of the adventure subsided to make way for the sobriety that often follows the high adrenaline rush of such life endangering ventures, our senseless chatter evolved into a reasonable discussion – “What next?”. As soon as the matter of funds available with each one of us was brought up, I found money (which I don’t recall keeping) in the apparently water-proof pocket of the swimming trunk (that I don’t remember having worn in the van); the kind of pleasant surprises that are exclusive to the realm of dreams alone. Perhaps, satisfied with the way the things were turning out and with the surety of our return to the civilization, I broke out of my nap.

Moral of the Story: All’s well that ends well!