Dark Horse Arts and Sciences

Do you have some sort of fear that has transcended all the boundaries of your hibernating subconscious to reach you at the dead of the night? Do you still dream of falling from a large building only to end up waking up all sweat and wet on your bed in pitch darkness? Well, you are not all alone. I have my fears too, all reserved and stored in some dark corner of my consciousness, only to frighten me up at an awkward hour of a rainy night. Fears symbolize our insecurities towards certain things. Someone is afraid of the dark; someone, of a barking dog; someone, of cockroaches; and me, of heights and large bodies of water.

I reside in a town next to the Bay of Bengal, a sea that’s infamous for bringing up super cyclonic storms every year to the coastal areas. We have had some serious cyclones in the past that has threatened lives and human resources. What cyclones do is, they don’t kill people directly. Instead, they take away everything from them, almost killing them while still leaving them alive. It’s more applicable to the poor. They are undoubtedly the worst sufferers of any natural calamity. The poor have already so many problems stalking up in their lives. They have innumerable burdens weighing on their shoulders, and what a cyclone does is putting more weight on them. So, their unstable chawls being uprooted out of the ground by those 200 kph winds; water moving with an inward flux to their small verandas; not getting enough food to feed the children are obviously a poverty-striken person’s nightmare here. It’s the fear of not being able to feed their own children at some point of time, must what drive them nuts. It’s the fear of sleeping under a naked sky without any roof, with mosquitoes roaming around your ears, that must give them sleepless nights.

As a resident of the coastal area, even I have my fears for the calamity. It’s not that we have a concrete roof that will guarantee us safety during horrid times. Often do I have dreams in which I find myself in the middle of a deserted ocean. Since childhood, I have got some phobia towards large bodies of water. It’s their amount that scares the hell out of me. One of the reasons why I haven’t bathed in the sea ever in my life can be the above factor. What if that much water pulls me into those dense waves, holding me through its claws, never loosening its grip? What if I get drowned and my dead still and swelled up body reaches the coast after two days? Those kinds of thoughts often make me anxious and breathless. What if a tsunami hits my town, and everyone of my relatives is dead except me? That’s my worst nightmare. I would rather die than live all alone in a deserted tsunami-hit post-apocalyptic town.

It will be an understatement if I say this isn’t my worst nightmare. It has had several appearances in my dreams in the past, which sometimes make me think whether it would come true. Dreams coming true isn’t an uncommon thing in the real world. They do occur in real and sometimes even occur almost as if they are copied and pasted from that vivid form in which the person had dreamt it in that horrifying night. They have that mysterious and dark aura around them that differentiates them from other subconscious experiences. This dark aura is what fascinates artists, filmmakers and writers to delve deep into the abstract world of dreams. For instance, me. Every writing piece of mine has some form or description about dreams, whether it is in or out of context. Somehow, I manage to bring this up. I don’t know, I just love talking about them. I love knowing about what kind of absurdity people experience in the middle of the night. So, again, this was another of those weird kinds of articles where I started off with something and ended with something completely out of context. This may seem really repetitive, but this is what I love writing about; dreams, absurdity and darkness therein.