Dreams are perhaps one of the strangest phenomena of this world. A state of mind in which you relive the best or the worst moments of your life, in which your heart’s inner most desires come to life, in which you face your greatest, most terrible fears. Desires and fears that although not known to you, affecting you as if they are real. Thus, dreams are a mirror of one’s deepest thoughts, reflections of the feelings that are hidden in a person’s inner most recesses, like a movie which is directed, produced and written by your subconscious for you to watch in a surreal mental cinema.
However even more peculiar are the dreams of those who can hear the songs of the birds, but can not see them fly, who can feel the warmth of the sun on their faces, its redness behind the closed eye, but cannot see the sun rising or setting, who can listen to the laughter of their family and friends but cannot see the smiles etched on the faces of their loved ones, who can only dream, envision and see through a blackening haze, the merest whisper of a shadow, a blurry silhouette, perchance a figment of a blind man’s imagination. Dreams; an amazement and confusion among the sighted, are even more peculiarly strange to the not so unsighted.
In the early days of my blindness, I did not actually register the change in my dreams. Perhaps I got used to the darkness around me because I was just a child of eight years old when I met my accident. Nevertheless, it was not until my sixth grade of schooling that I gave the thought any real consideration, as in thought about the real matter itself.
I was sitting in the lounge, listening to a TV show, when the telephone rang. I went to answer it and discovered that a student named Amna of FJ University was doing a project on blinds and their dreams.
She wanted to know everything about my dreams. I told her that in the beginning of my blindness, I could distinguish colored outlines of shadows. I call those images shadows because shadows are nearest to those vague, incomprehensible, vapor like images. I then explained to her, the complete absence of light and described that curtain of darkness which had suddenly fallen upon my life, my dreams became secondary, lost and broken in the fragments of my now-not–so–seeing eye.
Still, in my early dreams as a blind young man, I used to have glimpses of blurred and broken images of the places I had visited and distorted pictures of my family and friends, mostly of my parents and siblings, with fear and anxiety wrapped around me like a strong python who intends to kill you by coiling itself around your body. Such dreams resulted in my waking up and calling for my parents. Also, they haunted my nights and made them sleepless but how long can one avoid sleep. So eventually I returned to my sleepless slumber at night. With the passage of time, I grew accustomed to my unusual dreams; I was evolving even as a blind man, oblivious to the so called real world, I created a world of sound and memories, I gave colors to voices, each person having a distinct personal shade,a hue; dream life, or real life, it was my life, the one that I lived with a calm and a poise, and with frequent bouts of temper losses to add color to my life.
As I journeyed deeper in the world of sounds, the memories of past became half forgotten and so the shadow-like people in my dreams lost their colored outlines to become denser darkness, but mother nature is not so unkind to deprive me of the ability to distinguish people from one another. Hence as a recompense for my loss, I was given a unique gift of distinguishing people by the colors of their voices. Thus, people in my dreams, who had become mere darkness with a little density, evolved in to voice lamps in my lightless
world. Their colored voices became as precious to me as water is to fish, water to the thirsty, sunshine to deprived-forced-into-isolation-inmate. And they fell on my ears as rain falls on a barren land, reviving it.
After listening to the metamorphoses of my dreams, Amna asked me to narrate one of my recent dreams. I could not however because it is very difficult to narrate a dream in which only voices can be heard. She concluded my interview, thanked me and dropped the call.
Ever since that interview I was waiting for a dream to come which would be rich in detail. After three years, when I was having trouble with the school administration in accepting me as a normal student, I dreamt about the old days. All those memories returned with the sharpness of a knife; memories which were lost in the excitement of new discoveries.
That night I found myself in Sialkot, in the garden of our home, as a guide to my present-day friends. My heart was full of dread, anxiety which made it harder to breathe and as I moved about in the house, I realized how things had changed, everything was the same and yet distinctly different. I was actually seeing it all, but through the veil of a thick mist. The outline of the swing on which my sister and I played was half visible and so were many other little things, which jarred and pierced my soul, all that and more, lost in the shadows of my blindness. I was nostalgic for things I remembered not, sights from another lifetime, another existence. The darkness within is far more terrifying than the darkness outside. My entire life was a halo of overwhelming darkness and surrounding me like air, inescapable, everywhere. The darkness again engulfed me; voices ebbed, diminished and then got lost in the blur of my dreams, my waking dreams and my sleeping rages. And I woke up. And then an odd tear in the corner of my eye, the mist that flowed, unchecked, and unabashed, this unbridled sorrow that knew no bounds, took me unaware in my dark sleep.