I had one of those dreams; not a nightmare I know my blood from my water. A long, detailed dream that you feel you’re a part of somehow. The type where you feel everything, see everything, the emotions aren’t feigned and what’s worst is you wake up with your heart pounding in your mouth. I woke up awhile ago… and it’s still pounding; galloping at a fierce pace, my breaths coming slowly.

I dream. I always have. And it’s been a very LONG time since I’ve experienced one this epic, this genuinely realistic that I can’t decide if it’s a precognition, a reminiscing of some sort or a promotion or whatever. Hell… I am still breathing like I’ve just finished a triathlon. I am anxious, I am concerned and yes… quite confused.

Even when I was young I’ve had these… things and it’s made no sense as far as I can tell except that when they do happen they spin my head inside out. I dreamt that I consumed a LOT of alcohol and somehow while asleep could feel the weight of the burden, the crucifixion of the intoxication throbbing in my head. My head was burning and it was terribly nauseating. Best part is when I woke up I felt I had one fuck of a hangover. My head’s still burning.

I am not surprised by having this. I figure I am supposed to derive some kind of understanding from this. I just don’t know what at this moment. Still breathing like a maniac. See I categorize night time sequences like this: good dreams, bad dreams, incoherent abstract dreams and then nightmares.

This wasn’t a bad dream. This wasn’t incoherent because I remember clearly how I felt in the dream which is still how I feel while being blurry eyed, with my sexy mane all knotted and a friggin’ mess… but the awful, awful breaths. They keep struggling to come out.

I was reading yesterday that the feeling of success sometimes is a far more terrible feeling than the feeling of failure, and I thought that was very interesting. If it makes next to any sense at all then the thing with my good dream is that ALL the good things in it scared the hell out of me; ‘cos that is how it used to feel like…that’s how it used to be. It took me back to place that even I was afraid to go.

I dreamt I was in some kind of a bungalow or a ‘walawuwa’ of some sort. It had the architecture and the interior of the kind of place you visit when you’re a kid and it stays with you. Everything from the mosquito nets (which were downright weird, haven’t seen mosquito nets over a bed in a LONG time) to the loos, to the hallway… it was nostalgic in pure obscurity.

Then I was with a group of friends from College; the entire click. Everyone was there. And it felt exactly the way it felt in College during intervals when most kids would either go running about, be in a hurry to eat or choke on their food and others would scatter all over the grounds… but 7 or 8 students would all gather like it was a daily, silent, unspoken ritual into one class room. These guys have known each other for freaking ages, since joining College in Pre-grade and then Grade 1 and so forth. It’s one of those things that we all looked forward to in school; hard to know why because we hardly really spoke about anything worthwhile other than girls, girls and (not to sound like motley fucking crue) but errr girls. It was our therapy. A few discussed music but then all of us were divided in reference to that topic because it was only me and perhaps two or three others who listened to Rock music; the notorious satanic verses of our time. Some of us used to get punished in college for listening to Rock music…how fucked up was that? Of course carving and etching band names from ACDC, Aerosmith, Metallica, Testament, to Black Sabbath and White Zombie on a new school table could arouse and disturb certain people understandably. ‘Cos the general trend was to carve our initials, girls names or just rhymes compact with swearing and nonsense for solid fun.

So these 7 or 8 guys were all in this bungalow like place… and those who drank drank, the ones who do drugs did drugs, the ones who chose sobriety due to religious and greater moral beliefs stuck to their horses. The feeling of the booze scorching my throat felt very real. And we were sharing good times, the guys were getting calls from their wives and weren’t picking up their phones and everyone had that mischievous gleam in their eyes. That gleam when we all went for English Lit tuition to a Lit teacher who seemed to fantasize about Shakespeare and his spear living in a cozy room on the top floor of a posh apartment complex in Colombo, we used to get there early go to the roof top and errrrrr piss on to the road in turns. We used to do a lot worse… but then somehow what we REALLY looked forward to were the lit classes ‘cos this veteran of lit used to feel herself when we used to talk about Blake, Yeats etc., which was quite funny.

Anyway so here we are discussing shit, good times and then that thing which almost ALYWAS happens when old friends meet did happen. That precarious moment where everyone goes silent; some munching on whatever bites are there, one or two staring at their liquor glasses as if it would reveal their future to them and others just gazing away almost wishing that this could last forever… that the hands of time could be rewound and swung backwards and we would be back in a safe zone where we didn’t have to worry about bills, rent, abortions, kids, work and the corporate grind couldn’t separate us… divide us… but then the bitter truth settles in like a moth to a flame. Where we know the good times will end and we MUST return to the world as it is… the world we know… the one where no matter how hard you kill yourself and work you’re faced with trials and tribulations of unspeakable magnitude. And the fucked up thing is it was like everybody KNEW this and shared this thought at once. Even the ones that have completely severed themselves from us. The one or two who are so corporately and instinctively bound to their work ethics and selves that they are even ashamed to let the memories of the good times roll into their heads. Some people are like that. Once you move on with life and experience a new world you tend to yearn to want to forget the old one… the pains and the feelings of the old world perhaps because going back to that place is traumatizing enough, it just gets harder and harder to admit that we all need to escape sometimes.

And then the worst part when old friends, enough intoxicants and reality sinks its teeth ripping our thoughts like they were paper napkins sets in. Everyone thinks of that which they’ve lost and miss the most. For some it’s the loss of parents, family, friends and girl friends and for others soul mates.

I am one of the buggers who open my mouth and let the demons fly out like it’s a dark spiritual winter and the winds are calling out for test subjects to toss about. The first to do so and let my alcohol wrenched guts fall onto the floor because no one wants to shed the first tear of regret… it’s one of those stupid manly things that even after all this time no one wants to be seen as the one who broke the first sweat. I speak of things that I wish that we weren’t this divided, that we could meet again and do this – our little college therapy at least once or twice a week and I receive stares from one or two who in the REAL world have forgotten their past and have opted to pretend they never had such an existence before. It wouldn’t work with their banker, lawyer, doctor persona. It would be demeaning to dig up old photographs with their colors faded through time…because they can’t deal with the truth that no matter what they achieve or what they do that like a tree if the roots die, the tree ultimately withers. Not on the outside; you can be rich, you can be a pro-gofer all you want to be, you can be experienced and educated, religious so your community respects you but you’re dead inside. And I could see one or two were dead inside because there was no light in their eyes. Just holes that reflected something I personally could not relate to. Those eyes that judged and seemed to silently question ‘who the fuck are you to want such things? You’re just a long, haired, tattoo infested freak with piercings aren’t you? What have you got that we haven’t?’

And that broke my heart… in my dream I could feel my insides leeching on the feelings. When you’ve known each other long enough you don’t even have to speak out loud… you know what the other person is thinking. It’s the truth. Those eyes that get watery and then just shine like embalmed limbs of a corpse. How easily they shut out what they feel. How can I learn to do such brave things? Keeping things bottled up is fine… but it ain’t easy when you’re a musician, a writer, an artistic type.

What broke my heart more was how those one or two guys looked around the room at the others who also may not be stereotypically in a similar place of ‘wealth, merit and qualification’ as these guys are – but I could see even how they still care, they want to change things but they can’t. We are who we are. The sooner we learn to deal with it the better it is.

Then one guy shatters the barrier in his drunken state by speaking of the sole woman he’s always loved and how he wants her back. The others follow and then it makes sense that some are married because of inevitabilities and not out of choice. Almost a twisted push of fate which has led them to tie the knot and how their souls are fucking trapped now. They are too damned good to yearn for anything different but out come the beans and the truth with the vomit that would follow.

And it FEELS so fucking REAL. I was there… I am there and then a familiar feeling that I’ve not encountered in years maybe, chokes me… literally chokes me. Squeezing my windpipe… clutching my heart and choking it and how it beats faster and faster and faster. That swelling of the gut and the deep pain of the mind follows. Memories ebb and flow and then once the dam bursts open there’s nothing you can do. I couldn’t do anything I saw the face of the one person I’ve respected more than any other human being in my life and I lost him when I was 10.

I dreamed of that too… and that was the scariest day of my life. When I woke up everything happened the way I dreamt it and even before my mother told me I knew the bad news… I felt it inside. Step by step I saw every fucking piece of it thread together… like someone had pressed rewind and I was repeating the incident… I remember how she handed me a glass of water her hands shaking and then how she couldn’t speak… none of that mattered… because I had SEEN and BEEN in that situation before it happened.

Then I felt the presence of the second person that has haunted me for many years since… a face that never betrayed me, never doubted me or my decisions, a face that always saw through the iron and that thirst for a greater salvation. The only woman I’ve ever REALLY loved, the person whose heart I broke by walking away and turning my back to her. It was the bravest and the most stupidest thing I’ve ever done so far in my life…because I remember how I felt when I chose to end it and then when I turned my back to her… when I started to walk away and I heard her whispering my name, shouting and then screaming for me to look back and I didn’t. With legs like melting wax and a heart painted black I just walked down the road which felt like an eternity of pain. And I have re-lived that day over and over again… and that face and those feelings were eating me up in my DREAM but they were also eating me up in my SLEEP.

A lot more happened after that… I can’t write about it all. Writing is therapeutic but it’s also painful. Just can’t. My breaths are still bursting out in quick succession and then I recall how our little meeting had to end, how everyone bid each other farewell; those with regret in their eyes and those who couldn’t wait to get the hell away from us.

I still can’t decipher what the dream meant… except that after almost a year I did dream something that to tell you guys the truth doesn’t feel like a dream at all. I was there… will it happen? Won’t it?

And those silent words ring true in my head ‘What have you got that we haven’t?’

It would have broken my heart even further to answer them. To give them a response with my silence. Because in such silences strange things could rise.

‘What have you got that we haven’t?

Oh… I have so much that you guys don’t have. Pain. Reflection. Hope. Love swimming in ashes. Pain.

Would you like to share my DREAMS? >:-[