It gives me great pleasure to fly in dreams. I can move upwards easily avoiding whatever comes on the way. The phenomenon puzzled me till I met a stranger in the lakes the other day.
Trees lining the lake sheltered the migratory birds during winter. The stranger, sitting beside me, keenly watched the birds as well as me.
“Are you still thinking about flying in a dream?” The man asked me as if he were a thought reader. His voice was so mysterious that I forgot to get offended although being spoken to by a stranger.
“Yes, but…?”
He said, “These birds fly across mountains and deserts to reach warmer environs.”
“But how is it related to my dream, sir?”
“You fly in a dream when a particular window of your mind opens. You must have observed that you fly in dreams in a pleasant state of mind.”
“I am not exactly sure, though I feel great pleasure in dream-flying. I wonder why I lose height slowly after some time. The gravitational pull becomes too much to overcome then. ”
The gentleman ignored me and went on elaborating his theory.
“The brain stores enormous data which include your coded anthropological history. Once decoded, you can reconvert yourself to one of your earlier forms of existence, which might even be that of a bird.”
“Has anyone busted the code yet, sir?”
“The code is a complex matrix based on all the relationships involving the four-dimensional vector distances among the stars of a particular constellation. For example, you can change yourself to a bird with the code Sagittarius and so on. You must be very careful about time, the fourth dimension. It’s the key.”
He smiled happily revealing the greenish inside of his mouth.
“Is the future also written in the brain like the past? Is the brain a kind of a continuum, sir?” I could not suppress my puzzled look while asking this.
His reply confused me still more.
“Yes, the time-space continuum forms the canvas of the puzzle. Otherwise how could I tell you things, which are still on a different time plane?”
I tried to grasp his contention. Time flew. A few moments seemed like eternity.
The person vanished into thin air in those missing moments. A big green frog jumped from his place into the lake and looked at me with bulging eyes wearing a familiar expression on its face.
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Other works by Siva Gopal Ojha:
Short stories:
Essay: