the dream-reality diary

i woke up from the strangest dream.

it revolved around my diary.

there were so many things happening with my diary-dream i'm kinda losing the link between them. but the essence of my dream was that my diary had a link with reality (whatever happened in my life was written in my diary, as it is with most diaries). the writing didn't happen automatically, because i was writing it down myself. but it seemed like i was writing it as it happened, while not being physically present with the diary wherever it was actually happening. but i was also physically present wherever reality was happening (ie it was happening to me and not to someone else). so it's almost like there were two realities i was experiencing at the same time, one of which was sitting at a desk on a sunny afternoon at my parents place, writing in my diary. however, it didn't "feel" like there were two of me: it was more like my mind was jumping between the two bodies, while simultaneously experiencing both. my reality was all in india, experiences that were plausible with people i remember, but nothing that actually happened although they seemed real at the time.

but then comes the funny part: i could strike off parts of the diary that I had written, and they would cease to have happened. my diary also had scribbles in the margins, and modifying those scribbles seemed to have a two-way link with reality, with a similar feeling of being present in both.

and then, there were the dreams: there were pages in my diary which were clearly dreams, and as i flipped through them i spotted glimpses of familiar ones that i've blogged. and it almost seemed like there was a link between my blog and my diary, because everything i've blogged was also in in. during the dream (which seemed to last a few days), i had a few dreams, which i was transcribing at various points: one was a dream about the differences between being an English-speaking tourist in France and Germany. in the dream within the dream. I was comparing the phrases you'd have to learn to be able to get by in either country. the situations were so weird and the phrases even more so, that i concluded while writing these down that it wasn't reality but a dream that i was transcribing. once i was conscious that i was writing dreams in my diary, i didn't bother editing embarrassing bits out.

another dream within my dream was about shruti having a conversation with two of her friends, and suddenly putting me on the phone. the strange bit about this dream is that i was dreaming of writing my diary while on the phone! so it was a dream of writing my diary within a dream of writing my diary, except that in the dream within the dream, it was the same physical existence that was writing the diary and speaking on the phone. and somehow that convinced me that i was dreaming within my dream!

back out of the diary-dream within the dream, i kept flipping pages in my diary, and even read a few old pages - these were actually days of my life from a few years ago that i can distinctly remember to this day. but the difference between those old pages and the ones that i wrote over the course of the dream was that te new ones felt like reality and the old ones felt like text.

also, the dreams and reality pages of the diary were not adjacent, and i kept cross referencing the two, involving a lot of flipping back and forth, and occasionally getting lost between the two. that was another strange thing about the diary-writing me: i didn't have to struggle to keep up with reality (and i'm a real slow writer!), and i didn't feel any pressure to keep up. i could flip back and forth while writing, even read some stuff in between, and it didn't seem like i was losing sync with reality.

now that i think about it, it almost seemed like the writing of the diary controlled reality!

at one point, i got confused when flipping between the dream and reality sections of the diary (i was searching for reality but read a dream that i didn't remember, and it took a good bit of reading before i concluded it was a dream!). i flipped more carefully, nothing the number of blank pages between both sections. it seems i just had a few dozen pages left of reality before i run out of space to write.

which meant i would need a new diary. i wondered if i should go for a hard-bound one (like my first diary) or a soft bound one (like this one). i also wondered if it would be nicer to switch to green and red ink like i used to, or stick with my current boring black ballpoint pen.

and that's when i woke up.