I had a dream
last night. (I don’t call it at 3 this
morning. I prefer to call it last
night at 3.) In that dream, I was in some type of hotel. That hotel had an
ancient little statue. It was a fat, stout old man’s statue. The statue had a
long thing in its hand. Most probably it was a whip. But its purpose was not
torture. The hotel people had told me once that that statue had been built
under the supervision of some old Indian sultan like Aurangzeb, and inside it
was a wonder of mechanical engineering. For the statue could dance about
exactly like a human being, some moves being very fast. It would jump and spin
its whip and perform complicated body movements very fast. I watched its
performance once more last night.

Now, the thing is, I’d been to that hotel before at another time
and had learnt about the statue and watched its performance. This was the
second stay at that hotel. I’m damn sure of that. Even in last night’s dream I
knew that I’d been there in an earlier dream, some other day.

However, now that I’m in wake mode, I realize that I haven’t ever
before recollected having dreamt of such a thing.

The question is then: did I really ever dream of it before last
night, or was that feeling woven into last night’s dream? Because I’ve often
felt just a feeling in dreams. Not vision, not touch or sound, just a feeling,
but as real as the senses. Perhaps even more efficiently real, because senses
are just a means to achieve an end. And that end is a feeling, a fact lodged in
your head. Although dreams are entirely feelings, feelings of sensory
stimulations without having sensory stimulations, there are some cases where
even that is absent, and you are not given a sensory feeling to deduce a fact. You
are just given that end fact without having to deduce it. This is how you
sometimes know things in dreams.

Or did I actually dream of it earlier, but in the same night? I’ve
learnt that people dream in intermittent bursts. I might have been thinking of
a previous burst. However, I can tell you that it distinctly felt like recalling
something that had happened a few days ago.

Or maybe I had really dreamt of it some other day, only couldn’t
recall it in wake mode. Instead, it came back in sleep mode. Who knows? (This
last one may not be a rhetorical question.)

This has happened to me many, many times before. Even in waking
moments, I sometimes come across stuff that rings a bell in there, but I can’t
recall when such a thing had happened before. Sometimes I realize that I’d seen
such a thing in a dream, and sometimes it’s just déjà vu.

1Life.

Tags: dreams, recall, dejavu