Dreams are windows into the lives of our Multiversal Selves

I’ve recently come to discover that my dreams have been becoming more vivid. I sleep and suddenly I’m unaware that I’m asleep. My brain transforms into a kind of antenna that broadcasts the lives of multiple versions of me from parallel realities. It’s hard to explain but I’ll try anyway.

For the last six or so years I’ve been a nocturnal person, my parents are surprised I haven’t yet befriended Bats and Owls. Although there was this one time when a bat took a detour into my face as I was entering through the gates of my house riding my scooter, I know, scary right? Luckily I was wearing my Blue helmet. I felt like Bruce Wayne there for a second. I do wanna become Batman someday, I really do. Someday I’m going to find a Cave, or rather build myself one and then I’m gonna go out in society and say things like “I’m gonna buy this hotel, right here, right now”. Every boy wants to grow up and become Bruce Wayne/Batman. Batman in Chennai wouldn’t be as cool, pretty sure of that. I’ll let you guys know when I relocate, actually I won’t, cause then you’ll know I’m Batman, ie if I manage to pull this off. On the off chance that I don’t become Batman, and someone else does, please don’t go around telling people that I, Kaushik Ravindran decided to become Batman at so and so place on Earth, because that wouldn’t be true. But then again, you’ll never know.

Coming back to point, I don’t sleep at night. I stay up. I stay up until dawn and then I sleep. When I close my eyes to sleep, I see bright red and then I’m out. When I was a kid I used to face east, close my eyes and wonder why I see red. I instantly pieced together that it was the blood inside my eyelids that was being shown to me by the bright rays of the sun. “Aah so this is the only way of seeing blood without being bruised or wounded in the knee”, I remember thinking to myself. Blood and pain were synonymous, or so I thought until I grew up.

I discovered the joy of pulling all nighters at the crisp age of 17. I remember feeling at peace, almost as if I was in control of the reality around me. Just me in my room, and all I could hear was the Air Conditioner hissing quietly, electricity coursing through veins of copper, full of life, my room, my friend of the night. I finally had this cocoon where I could catch my breath for a moment, a moment that lasted a whole night.

I felt grateful for the moon and the stars above me. I felt grateful for the Earth’s rotation, giving me a chance to look up at the sky and see what the sky looked like when the Earth turned away from the sun. Then again going up to the terrace during the night to stargaze meant being among all the mosquitoes, so I rarely did that thereafter. Sometimes when it's after evening and I’m riding my beloved blue Vespa on a dimly lit empty road, with the view of a clear sky, if I’m lucky enough considering the Lunar cycle, I’d get a full Moon to gawk at. Music in my ears, wind in my hair, Lune on my trail, just following me as I drive the bumpy roads of Chennai.

The moon has always fascinated me. Chandran, Nilavu, Lune, Luna, the humans that coined these words knew what they were doing cause it sounds exactly like it seems. Language is so awesome, you’ve got a word for everything. If you have a good enough Vocabulary you could condense a really long sentence into a small cute one, a strong emotion into a cool sounding word, just one word, and in turn you could fabricate that into a sentence, like multiple ideas on a string. This is the ultimate dream for any writer, I’d say. Succinctness is in vogue.

Too many thoughts I’m having, I keep shifting topics while writing without realising. Back to what I was saying. I have both Intentionally and Unintentionally trained my mind to capture my dreams and remember them. They are quite interesting my dreams, sort of like a blurry but wildly exaggerated vivid interpretation of familiar places and people. The scenarios that unfold are quite unreal and very unlikely to happen in my own known reality. I usually realise this when I’m awake, but everything seems so real when the dreams are happening. It’s also very interesting, I dream in panoramic view. The only explanation for the scenarios and the distinct Dream filter that always seems to be on, is that these dreams actually are taking place but in parallel or different realities. And somehow my mind gains access to these parallel versions of me like a multiversal mind bluetooth connection, and only sleeping supposedly activates this pairing of sorts, enabling me to see in the eyes of other kaushiks.

Maybe deja vu is when reality resembles our dreams, a sense of familiarity we’ve only experienced in our subconscious mind that somehow seems to resonate with our conscious. Now that I’ve been practicing how to Lucid dream, I deja vu in my dreams.

There’s this recurring dream scenario that keeps happening to me, I’m reliving my past in this dream every time it happens. I’m suddenly back at school and the board exams are nearing and I feel fear because of what’s about to come, I haven’t acquired my skills in music yet, so its like I’m looking into parallel versions of me who are at this point in life and the way I feel in the dream takes me back to the way I felt when this actually happened to me in my reality. But the view of the dream, the subtle lighting and the dream filter look and feel phenomenal. The whole thing seems vague and vivid at the same time like some kind of foggy static blurry picturesque vision. If I ever direct a film I’d try mimicking this dream filter/lens of mine. A good script with masterful dialogues, familiar faces and Tarantino inspired shots, my movies would be blockbuster hits, each one of them. Dream filter is that good I’m trying to say.

Sometimes familiar places morph together. One moment I’m at school, I enter a room exiting the corridor and suddenly I’m back home and now it feels as if both my house and school are conjoined, united by my subconscious. Now this is a very simple example, dreams are a very private thing, and I have super complex dreams that I could spend a day trying to articulate in detail. But I’d still feel like I’m leaving something out, hence a simple example from my dreaming experience should do.

I always after waking up try to recall all the dreams 

I’ve dreamt. Sometimes I remember the whole dream, scene after scene. Other times I’ve to try piece it together, make a mental motion picture. Some dreams seem important and remain memorable, others I try to remember never again. After many dream incidents, I am now convinced that dreams are but windows into the lives of our multiversal selves. And yes, I’ve felt this way long before the sequel to Doctor Strange came out.

This one time I started lucid dreaming mid dream. It was evening and I knew this because the skies were pink. I could see the sun set in a very beautiful scenery, it was beautiful, more beautiful than real sunsets I know and love. I happened to be wearing my Airpods while walking back by myself into a Marriott from its gates. A whole other incident took place before this, something I wish not to document. Now in my dream, as I was walking back, I suddenly realised that I was hearing music on my Airpods which were in my ears. It was the Aashiqui 2 Album, Sun Raha hai was playing. “Hey, I know this song!” I thought to myself, but then something changed, the production of the song seemed different than the one I was familiar with. It was at this moment, I had realized I was dreaming. I was no longer just watching through the eyes of this other me, I became the other me. I was lucid dreaming now, I curiously took out my phone from my pocket, looked through it. I opened Spotify, and I went to the Aashiqui 2 Album. Not only was the whole song order different, there were more songs and the Album cover was looking even better than the real one. The music was still playing and there were better elements to it, it was way better than the real one. Instant Jealousy I felt, so jealous of parallel me, this guy had a better reality.

So either my mind is pure genius to create this whole dream scenario in itself, making me subconsciously remix the whole Aashiqui 2 Album, adding more sublime tracks to it while I was supposedly subliminally at it...or dreams are but windows into the lives of our Multiversal selves.