Introduction and Theory (Skip this section to see the nightmares—which are definitely more exciting):
One facet of the human experience I’ve been into for a while is dreams. We’ve recently been focusing on creative writing at the Viking Vibe, but fiction doesn’t move along without the hand of the author guiding it. Characters don’t really exist; they don’t choose; they don’t grow by themselves. Dreams on the other hand are sincere. If a dream makes you uncomfortable—it isn’t doing that intentionally. It’s just doing it. A dream isn’t something you make up—the most you can really do is transcribe it from the aether of the subconscious.
What that implies is that the crampedness of a nightmare may be one of the most accurate reflections of a person’s real-life anxieties that can be—no matter how abstract the visions may be. In comparison to the writer, who has to toil in creating “The Big, Scary Monster Who Was a Metaphor for Grief,” the dreamer has it easy. His big scary monster who is a metaphor for grief is effortless and a construction of his own mind in reaction to circumstance.
That asks questions of circumstance, then. If dreams are an unfiltered reaction to circumstance, that implies we are able to understand a person’s circumstance through their dreams.
A psychoanalyst will say at this point, “Sourya. This isn’t new. Freud did this. Freud looked at dreams to understand people.”
Well, yes. But Freud looked at the dreams of an individual to make observations about the individual. But let’s go further. What can the Viking Vibe do to maybe make Freud a little more relevant—or empirical? We can broaden the data set.
Let’s try to understand the circumstances of a group. What do all our subjects have in common? They all attend South Brunswick High School—so are there any commonalities in their dreams, it may come down to those circumstances. Those of a teenager in an infamously competitive, large public school. How about that part of our human experience?
I won’t be telling you, the reader, what conclusions to take from these dreams, nor what motifs to identify, nor how to interpret the symbols. That would ruin the idea that we are witnessing something raw, and I don’t want to present my interpretation as anything more than an interpretation, like one could have on the themes of a book. Would it be fair to make conclusions about the author based on what one interpreter believed about the work?
Do note, however, that the way the dreams were transcribed into their story-like form by me. That’s where the creative writing portion returns and some of the rawness goes. I generally chose the words myself, but—if the dreamer used a certain phrase more often when explaining the dream—I attempted to keep that style in the writing. I tried to preserve the “vibe” (for those who love when I use that word) in the way the dreams were explained to me, and checked with the dreamers after drafting to see if my portrayals of their experiences are acceptable.
Now, we can begin.
Dream 1: The Holes
I hadn’t been feeling well that night. I was forgetful and tired and sluggish and indolent and weighty and sluggish and weighty and forgetful. It was a Sunday, I think. Sunday night. So I had a ton of work to do for school. I hadn’t shaved either. I hadn’t shaved—so I decided to shave first before beginning anything else.
So I went to the bathroom. The lights were heavy too—a warm yellow like jaundice. I don’t like shaving because I always end up cutting myself, and it scares my mom when I do. But I don’t think my mom was home that Sunday night, because the house was empty. Normally my mom closes all the windows when it gets dark—when I was a kid I was always scared I’d see something looking at me through one of them. So that’s why my mom closed them.
I looked at the bathroom mirror—a little dirty like usual, and saw myself. As you’d expect. But my forehead was bigger than it should’ve been. I looked a little closer. And I saw three or four or five dark holes on it—with a diameter of about an inch. I got scared, I always get scared. But I walked closer to the mirror for some reason, and the reflection on the holes changed. I didn’t even notice there was a reflection before but there definitely was now.
I shifted left and right, and the lighting changed even more. Then I walked a little closer. And the inside got brighter, but not like the heavy jaundice lights above. Like a cooler blue shade. And I walked even closer, and now all three of the holes had the cool blue shade. All three of them showed pieces of the inside, which seemed to be completely dark and hollow in there. It looked like a monitor, like the synthetic blue light from a computer, and you could see different parts of it only through the holes in my head. God, my head was hollow. My head was hollow and there was a monitor outside.
I looked even closer now, and I could see the wallpaper. It was the old Windows XP one—“Bliss.” With the hill and the clouds and the sky. But there were words in the sky. The text was white, like the clouds, and the default Arial typeface. I looked even closer so I could read the words, and the words said “Thank you for your purchase!”
I don’t remember what happened next, but I was in the dining room. My mom still wasn’t here, so I was with two guys who were allegedly my friends—Aakshv and Lvaksh, neither of which are real names as far as I know. In truth I had no idea who they were at all, but for some reason I believed I’d known them forever. I think they were in police officer uniforms.
“Did anything weird happen with me recently? In the bathroom? With my head,” I asked. I thought I’d fainted or something because it’s the last thing I could remember.
Aakshv began talking in some friendly, jumpy demeanor. “Oh! Yeah!” he began. “We noticed you were going bald recently.”
Lvaksh joined in: “All your hair was falling out. That’s what we noticed.”
I’d only noticed my head was hollow and there was a computer inside since I’d gotten sick and started losing hair. But I had no idea how long it’d been. And despite the fact Aakshv and Lvaksh were my friends, I didn’t tell them anything. I suspected they already knew.
Aakshv joked a little more. “I told Lvaksh ‘we better arrest this guy for too much hair loss!’ He was telling me ‘maybe when he’s in jail we can get homework answers!’ What a funny guy.”
Dream 2: The Sage
I don’t remember if I was in the dream myself—I may have just been a spectator. Like I was watching a movie or something like that.
The whole thing began with this purple, swirly thing covering my whole vision. It almost looked like a super zoomed-in close-up of the nether portal texture from minecraft. There was this red text, but I don’t remember what it said exactly. Something about “killing you,” whoever I was. “I’m living my whole life just to get to killing you,” or “I can’t wait to already just kill you.” “You are __% finished,” said the subtitle.
It was all quiet. No one said anything at all. The text wasn’t spoken aloud, it was just on the screen. The screen disappeared just like that.
Then we (as in my family?) were moving to a new house in the jungle. I was still just watching. There was this Indian sage guy. His name was some Tamil word I know the meaning of, but couldn’t remember. The sage was rude and abrasive, but I tolerated him on account of the fact that he was “helping” “us” move.
All of a sudden he was helping us cross this bridge over a massive crater. The hole was so deep that the jungle edges around it created cliffs, and there was a pool of water at the bottom. The bridge wasn’t much—just a single, thin log that went on and on.
We got to the middle of the bridge, and the sage grabbed two golden tools, right out of his tunic. One’s a golf club and I can’t remember the other one. Then he pulled out a sheet of paper. I knew the paper was significant but I can’t remember why. I was still just watching.
Suddenly, the sage decided he had to be somewhere else. That he had some other errand my family would get in the way of. He abruptly jerked an electric fan out of his pant pocket or something like that and turned it on. The log below us began spinning.
The next thing I remember—the Viking Marching Band was taking a field trip to this girl’s wedding. She’s a real student at our school. We weren’t wearing our uniforms or bringing instruments or anything, but hey the marching band refused to yield nonetheless. When we got there, what was revealed though was that she actually wasn’t marrying anyone. The wedding was just for her.
Her family wore these tacky yellow dresses, and so did she. They were all doing speeches for her, and then she began to talk. She had the thickest Indian accent I’ve ever heard. It gave me whiplash—it isn’t how she talks in real life at all.
I was sitting with my mom, which I guess I realized only at this point.
“Ha! Imagine what these guys would do if they knew she was actually dating someone!” I whispered.
“Oh, for real?” asked my mom, chuckling. It only made sense, I guess—that she’d have this whole self-wedding to hide the fact she actually was dating someone.
Then the girl’s family just started throwing heaps and heaps of gold coins on the floor surrounding her, which matched the dresses.
When the reception ended, it was arcade time! I think it’s lovely that her family decided to put an arcade at their daughter’s self-wedding. The place originally looked like IPlayAmerica and then turned into the high school gym as game time proceeded. They had all the usual games, but this other guy I know in real life was going ham on air hockey. Him and his opponent were actually launching the mallets themselves at like fifty miles per hour, twenty feet from the table. It was like a war zone.
I joined ping pong, which itself became exactly as violent as the air hockey very quickly. I was spectating again, I realized, and I don’t even remember if I’d ever stopped. My vision was like a third-person video game where I could see myself play in the third person. My opponent (the same guy I know in real life) was sending out those ping pong balls like bullets. Right then and there—the font from the portal came back. On the side of my vision I saw the stats for each shot I made. Then the purple swirls came back too, and the original text. “You are 5% finished,” said the subtitle, and I sighed. This was going to take forever.
I woke up, but then the dream continued about two weeks later.
It was a priest—not the sage but a priest—who just lived a modern life here in New Jersey with everyone else. He told me and my wife (?) to name our son “Nihal Rohan,” and I was pissed off, because that’s a stupid name. I talked to my dad, who told me he actually just checked the priest’s reviews, and they all say he sort of sucks at naming kids.
All of a sudden I was driving in this residential neighborhood. But my brakes broke and I hit someone’s car. It barely left a dent but the guy was mad at me anyway. He was saying “You’re still unholy and are full of sin based on those disgusting wedding photos. You all will live a life of emotional blessing but physical pain.” I don’t know what his problem was. I think the only issue with the wedding photos was that we looked too happy in them.
I told my dad I’m going to find a better name for my future son. My best idea is to literally translate the word “strong” into Tamil. He said that’s fine.
Dream 3: Virtual Reality
It was a collective dream. I knew I was dreaming and everyone else knew they were dreaming too. But we didn’t know it was real. The government had developed a virtual/augmented reality dream simulation, à la Sharkboy and Lavagirl. It placed us in a post-apocalyptic society, which seems pretty on the nose. It was past irony, really. The manufactured apocalypse scenario itself stemmed from technology.
We all wore contact lenses, such that the government could not track our visions. But it was their simulation. We were still in their simulation, and we were still worried about them tracking our visions. Like I said—it was past irony.
My boyfriend and I communicated over email, which we accepted was untracked by the government—but we couldn’t be sure. He came over to my aunt’s house to pick me up. We went to the now abandoned Quakerbridge Mall to hang out.
He dropped me off when we finished, and I thanked him over email. But then my dad signed into my email on his phone.
He saw everything.
Suddenly the whole of reality shifted—just like that. We were in a suburban downtown area, à la The Good Place. A giant cyborg was killing people—right in front of me. My mom died, very suddenly.
She tried giving me everything she had, but my dad said no. He said I was cut off from the family because I had a boyfriend.
Then I woke up from the dream in a dream into another dream. It was inescapable. It was past irony. Apparently all that had happened in the augmented reality was just a way to comprehend what had happened in my real life, which was also a dream—à la Inception. I was hooked into a pod surrounded by other pods—à la The Matrix.
When I really did wake up, I still wasn’t sure if I was in my own reality for about thirty seconds. I don’t blame myself.
Dream 4: Signs
Imagine a drone going through this huge city. There’s some competition going on, in which the government or some rich entity is going to bless selected people by randomly giving them huge sums of money. To participate in the competition you’ve got to stand on your balcony with your family and pretty much just shout. Everyone’s got signs and they’re begging to be chosen. The whole city is decorated with those yellow banners. Each one lists how many people there are in that family and how much money they desire.
Dream 5: Tall People
This is a recurring dream. A group of people are at my house, except my house is a skyscraper—made up of itself stacked on top of itself repeatedly. Every night, the group of people at the house party is different, but the outcome is always the same. This hairy monster emerges. It has legs but you can’t see anything except its eyes. It’s silent, except for one phrase. “I really like tall people.” Then the monster begins chasing us. Everyone taller than me always dies, and everyone shorter than me always lives. Everyone dies the same way, but like I said, the group of people is always different. The monster always comes for me last, and I wake up right before it kills me.
…
Now, reader. You should wake up too.
