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For the major part of my life, I had one recurring nightmare.
I would find myself at the entrance of the eerie, narrow house where I lived until I was nine years old. That house felt like one long tunnel with a long trail of narrow, windowless rooms. Many rooms were locked for years, stuffed with old furniture that created a thick, stagnant odor in the air.
It is evening, the sun is setting, and the electricity is out. Then a voice next to me asks me to go inside to turn on a light or light a candle.
With my heart racing, I approach the front door and squint through the iron grills into the blackness that filled the house. My trembling hands reach out to the door handle. I start to sweat. My hand half-opens the door and then, I wake up with a sudden jolt, my body drenched. I must have had this dream at least a thousand times before I reached my mid-20s.
If the house was not enough, my Grandma’s ghost stories during the evening power cuts certainly made an impact. Her stories were always about the ghosts covered in flowing white clothes, fluidly moving around in the darkness of the house.
The ones that truly haunted me were the “floating hands.” They would emerge from the walls while people were eating, asking them to feed them. And there’s a very typical way they would ask “Would you please let me have some toooo!”, making a very long trailing ‘oooooo…’ All this made a big impact on me. And the follow up pranks from my siblings didn’t help much.
And then there was the “chest-sitter”- a ghost that would sit on my grandma’s chest in her sleep, making her immobile. My grandma could open her eyes and see but was unable to scream for help.
In my late teens, I read many books on human psychology, nature and dreams - some of them on Freud’s dream analysis around the concepts of id, ego and the superego. And then in mid-20s, I stumbled upon a different concept: Lucid Dreaming.
The concept was interesting but sounded like some myth, or made-up science: the realization by the person dreaming, that he is in a dream. I somehow could not believe the concept that you don’t just see your dream, but you can become the director of your own dream and can control the dream. You are the actor and the director of your dream. You are the observer and the observed.
I thought about the idea often, but eventually moved on to other books.
Then one day I was at the house and it was around the same time in the evening. Someone asked me to go inside and I started walking towards the door. With trembling hands I started to open the door. As the door half opened I panicked and woke up. It was the same dream again.
But as the days progressed, a new pattern started to emerge in the dream.
I would go towards the front door and suddenly I realized it’s a dream and I would tell myself it’s OK to walk through that door. In various variations of the same dream across months, I used to find myself making slight progressions- open the door and panic, step into the room and panic, turn on the light and panic. I would still wake up drenched. I would not always realize it’s a dream. But when I realized it’s a dream I would try to talk myself through the dream and it was not always successful.
There’s another variation of the same dream. In this version, I panic and then try to run. I am sure many others probably have a dream experience where they are not able to run, with legs stuck to the ground. This is a very generic anxiety dream that occurs for various reasons.
But in my version, I panic and try to run and then wake up but find myself not able to wake up. It feels like I am able to see things around me but there is someone holding me down to the bed. I can neither scream nor get up, not understanding if it’s a dream or reality. This is the most frightening state and feels like lasting forever.
Around this time I came across a book and it was on sleep paralysis, a very interesting scientific concept. During sleep phases like REM (Rapid Eye Movement) the brain is active and is dreaming. Imagine yourself running in your dream. What if your body tries to imitate that motion in real life and tries to run from the bed in sleep. Sleep paralysis is a great design where the brain paralyzes many voluntary muscles in the body during some phases of the sleep to protect the body from self harm.
This is exactly what my grandma’s “chest-sitter” story was about. Her dream-like hallucination experience was in fact the dream images leaking into her wakefulness.
Over time, my dream progressed in interesting ways. Sometimes I would find myself directly inside the house walking around doing usual things, only to realize later in the morning that I had that dream. Not every dream was a lucid dream. And when I had the “chest-sitter” dream I would try to take a deep breath and not fight it. I let it pass.
The ultimate experience is to be able to control one’s dreams.
No, I’m not going to say what I am doing in those lucid dreams where there are no boundaries.
Whether it is a dream-dream or a life-dream, you set your own goals and boundaries, and drive your dreams. There are always choices that come with some boundaries and all of them have consequences.
The observer can become the observed, both in dreams, and life.
After all, is life a reality or a dream? How do you know what you are seeing is real? The tagline for my 2019 short film “The Ghosts of the Past” is - “Reality is what you see.”
Growing up, we all heard stories from our grandparents.
What do I think of my grandma when I remember all the stories she told us? I don’t know if she made up those stories or genuinely experienced those moments and wanted to share them. After all, she was very popular in the household, helping deliver babies across five generations — her eight daughters, families of all the three brothers, and then taking care of all those babies.
Or maybe the stories reflect her rich and complicated relationship with the night, having witnessed life and death so closely for 95 years.
So yes, when I think of her I can only smile.
Rest her soul.
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