Tuesday, June 7, 2011

A Date with the Nolan World


I am sure most of you are familiar with the movie Inception, directed by the master of  mind-benders, Christopher Nolan. The experience I'm about to share is about a dream  I had, which was somewhat similar to the basic idea of the movie. Now, before I start, I'd  like to share my thoughts about the movie.The motive behind all the hard-work involving complex dream-monitoring devices, abstract and sometimes fictitious concepts related to the human brain activities during sleep and all the other stuff that give you a headache at the end of the movie, is to incept a business idea into the mind of a man who is the heir of a billionaire..In essence, it is similar to persuading/threatening a person to do something against his will. Isn't a bottle of  good ol' booze enough to persuade a man to sign a bunch of legal papers? :p.So much effort just to get some signatures from a man? Yet, I don't want to take any credit away from Nolan, as it is one of the very few films that keep the audience thinking right till the end.While getting people to watch movies is in itself a major achievement, keeping them interested throughout is a helluva lot more difficult thing to do and Nolan has mastered the art.
Now for my story..This happened during the study holidays before one of my semester exams.As many of you would've experienced, study holidays mean long hours of hibernation with short stints with books in between..:p I was in the middle of one of those "naps" when I had a dream. I was falling off a cliff.The usual one ,you may think. But it was different because I wasn't fully asleep and neither was I able to wake up out of the dream.So I tried switching scenes in my mind, but every time I tried to change the scene, I kept falling off different cliffs.The locations changed, but not the scene. There I was , having a free fall , hoping that at least when I eventually hit the hard ground, it will serve as the "kick" to wake me up.But it was not to happen. It was like, the earth's gravitational pull had been reversed and I was falling into the Heavens.I was trying all sorts of dumb things to snap out of the dream.I imagined taking out my cell phone and typing a text message(in mid-air...come on ! it's a dream) to my friend asking him to call me so that the sound of my phone ringing would wake me up.I tried slapping myself hard .When that didn't work, I tried to pry my eyes open so that I would wake up. Eventually I did wake up,to find that my last attempt at waking up wasn't a dream but I was actually clutching my left eye in an attempt to open it.The weirdest coincidence was yet to come.As always after a nap, I checked my cell phone to see if I had missed any calls and was shocked to see that I had a missed-call from the same friend I had tried to text in my dream.
Dan Brown in his book The Lost Symbol,wrote about the ability of people's collective thoughts to actually change the things around them. But I didn't know that a small thought about my friend, that too in my dream, was strong enough to persuade him to call me..:p 
Now,that is one dream that will remain in my memory for ever, not only for the weird things I did ,but also because it was like a nightmare minus the vampires, zombies and ghosts..:D

4 comments:

  1. The realm of weird dreams leading to the wow effect. Been there, done that :) Nicely expressed :) btw, what's it with the falling thing? I've always had it too, but mine's usually just the skipped heartbeat that happens when you miss a step.

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  2. I've had many dreams in which I usually feel the urge to cry out loud because I'm having a really bad fall,but every time I land slowly and nothing happens..There's a popular myth that, in such dreams, if you don't wake up before you hit the ground, you'll die..

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