Okay, ahem..disclaimer.
The last post was NOT about me going bonkers or me having a drug overdose or me wallowing in self-pity.
It was loneliness. And about somebody passing away. And certain other stuff which do not include the ones mentioned above.
On second thoughts, I was rash. And a tad hurried. The last post was DEFINITELY not blog-worthy. More of a private-journal-entry perhaps.
But it felt nice, this. I didn’t know so many people cared. :)
Anyways..

On other things,
My body clock has finally kicked the bucket and gone for a long overdue, all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii. Or so it seems. These days, 4 in the morning is the regular time for going to sleep. And eyelids don’t open until 10. It was enjoyable, in the beginning. The drip-drip-drip of the tap, the Isaac Asimovs, the rats scurrying by, the chocolate biscuits at night and the drip-drip again. But now-a-days, it sucks. Enough of it already. Sweaty, sleepy, cranky and with a sour taste in the mouth. Definitely not the way to be at 11 every morning.
However, this is where I roam about every night, when sleep refuses to come..


On moon day the dream king gave an audience to five small children who had traveled a long way, seeking their lost mother. He met them in a hall filled with scarecrows who whispered among themselves in the voices of the stars of the silent screen.
Dancing salamanders brought the children silver plates piled with exotic ice creams of various flavours, and with fruits they had never seen before and would never see again….although they would dream of them in rare occasions, until they died.
Gravely the lord of dreams listened to each child plead and beg, and then at the end, he drew a door in the air with his finger, and the children walked through it, into the rest of their story.
And on moon day he arbitrated in a dispute between the knight of clouds and the body politic. He awarded the magic lantern show to the knight of clouds, although he permitted the body politic to retain custody of the six screaming stones and the snows of yesterday.
He walked from his castle to the dreams of a small boy in Hong Kong. He remained there for some minutes, observing quietly. Then he left.
He ate in the dream of the head-chef in the best hotel in Sri Lanka, a dream of a certain meal described to the chef by his grandfather. The meal consisted of almost fifty separate courses, and over two hundred dishes. The king of dreams tasted sparingly of a vegetable dish, and a little plain rice, and was contented by the perfection of each.
He had been asked to permit the sending of a dream of warning to a teenaged girl in South Africa. With this dream to drive her, the girl would grow up to take charge of her country, to unite all the dividing factions. Without it, she would become a nurse.
He came to his own decision, and relayed it to the Tribal Gods from whom the request had come. His decision brooked no argument, had no appeal.
And then, to conclude the day’s work, he gave an elderly tortoise, alone on her island these past two centuries, a dream of her love, roasted by passing sailors long since, for his rich, green flesh.

On Truesday, the Prince of Stories listened to the tale of a nightmare it had created a handful of years before and sent out into the world. The nightmare brought gifts: a photograph of a smile, a handful of dried thyme and a clammy, fat, silver-and-red clown toy made of something not unlike rubber. He gave it words of approval in return and it blushed black with pleasure.
Then the prince of Stories walked the bounds of the dreaming, beginning with the shores of night, and from there to the borders of the shifting places. He took ship in the archipelago and inspected the skerries, tallying each one, no matter how insignificant.
He rode a black horse across the lake of dawn, and rode a white horse through the mandrake wood, and rode a screech owl over the via lacrimae.
He walked through the love fields, and from there he walked on into nightmare.



On Wodensday he walked the castle. The heart of the dreaming is as large as the dreaming itself. He began in the cellars beneath the castle where once many wines and jars and distillates were stored. He took counsels with the great spiders and exchanged quiet words with many-legged scuttling things, who viewed him as one of themselves.
In the afternoon the Lord Shaper walked through the rooms of the castle above the ground, talking to each of the staff in turn, hearing their grievances, acknowledging their service and their work.
He spoke to the scar-dancers, to the straw-dust-women, to the old man with the swan’s arm who tends back stairs, to the three children of the autopsy, to the painters and the scriveners and the walls.
He spoke to people made of thin twigs, and to the dream ghosts who left glowing footprints as the only evidence of their passage.
He spoke to the embryonic silicon dreams who clustered in the far ballroom, and whispered to them, briefly, about the other machines that had dreamed in the distant past.
When this day was almost over, he went into the throne room, and took stock of certain items there, including those things he keeps in that room, behind coloured glass: the raw stuff, untamed, that is central to the dreaming.



On Thirstday, the King Of Dreams walked in the waking world. He stood briefly at the side of the hall watching a young woman with a guitar, tell an audience of a dream she had had, in song.
He stood infront of a painting spray-painted on a wall soon to be demolished, and after staring for some time, he nodded, as if in approval.
In a small park in Central Europe, he stopped to feed the pigeons, because it gave him pleasure so to do, although he stopped when it was pointed out to him that a sign said “Do not feed the pigeons.”
He walked across the park, and watched an open-air performance of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. He was mildly disappointed by the translation. He was, however, extraordinarily amused by the performance of the actor playing the part of Bottom.
Later that day, he visited each of his properties in the waking world, checking the upkeep and the condition of each; and then he returned to the dreaming.



On Fire’s day, dream was reviewing certain of the various treaties and agreements, between the dreaming and other states and boundaries and entities, when he was disturbed….’
- Neil Gaiman.