Where was I? Yeah, the fifth floor of the multi-specialty hospital. Postoperative ICU. The nurse had just wheeled me in. Confused, fazed, I was alone in that liminal purgatory staring at the echoes of empty rows of beds and a pile of unplugged and discarded vital monitor units in a corner. They all seemed like they were at their end of life too.
Oh, and there were signs! A lot of them! White over red, black over yellow, statutory, safety, hygiene.
And then there was this one particular sign when I lifted my head from the bed. A wide open window across the room. An unsecured one. With no guardrails. In that morning light’s glow, it invited me like a portal calling. It was just a few metres away from my bed. My eyes widened with dread and my empty stomach churned. I looked around, I badly wanted Saran to smack me in the head and tell me that the ideas swarming out of my void was stupid. I wanted her to run into the room any moment now, screaming “Ammu!”, and tell me it was all a bad dream.
My mind, teeming with all sorts of scenarios, in an instant waged a war against my body. As I felt my heart palpitate and gripped the bed tight to cry out for help, the nurse waltzed back in and slid the door shut. I slumped back on the pillow with a thud. The weight of it felt like a damaged piece of meat!
I finally had a moment to think about dad.
K-hole
The nurse went through her mental checklist again. IV drip? Set! Connected to my line? Electrode pads pasted on to my chest and connected to the headwall unit? Oximeter? Done. Straps tight and secure? Very! I was a rock! I wasn’t particularly curious about anything. When she drew the curtains, I just asked her to remind my dad to eat as he’s prone to hypoglycemia.
The doctor came in with the vial, confirmed my name, weight, and height verbally and checked the reports once. She then administered the ketamine into the IV drip bag. I noticed her dark blue scrub (similar to the one that Saran wore on her fateful day) and uttered, “She was a doctor too!”
In the silence that followed, she did her best to console me and said, “Just close your eyes and relax. Try to sleep.”
Sleep? Relax? Ma’am, I’d just lost my wife! And with the monitoring unit above me beeping like an annoyed R2D2? I just screamed all this internally and nodded and slumped back on the pillow.
In about twenty-odd minutes all the sounds around morphed into a reverberated spectrum. The thread of conversation between the nurses, which I was involuntarily consuming, dissolved into whispers as the distant PA announcements muddled over it. My eyes wouldn’t open nor let a valid light register. My head slumped to the other side like it had found a gravity well. My limbs felt the cold of the bed frame and after throwing a minor fit, I clawed the fabric of the bed and grabbed it tight.
Time froze.
From one void, I lunged into another where chaos and calmness coexisted. I felt the warmth and grace of Saran’s embrace. In the darkness, her voice found me and guided me through this new realm. And then mom found me. I followed their smiles into a stream of light. A bazillion things exploded like stars. A whirlpool, except the current being time instead of water, yanked me into its orbit and as my face slumped to the other side, I spiralled in. The torrent of this exotic information worked my vocal cords to call them out loud … and the mouth raved! Mostly “Saranya” and “Mummy”, the words pronounced as heavy as they are. Something cold touched my right arm. My blood was oozing down my IV line. Even the pain felt like their kisses. I found a life, a machine that registered to my savvy mind as the ‘Voyager’, and some vague memory of the Earth, yeah, that pale blue dot photograph … all at a speed akin to that of the light itself.
This happened for two more sessions over the span of six days.1
Into the dreams
When my mom passed away, the initial days were a complete blur. After I crawled out of the limbo and started processing the shock, the first meaningful thing that happened to me was a dream. Mummy was calm. As usual, her face lit up upon seeing me. Just this time, it was the profoundest kind I’d ever seen. Like she was content and happy. She said (in Tamil), “I’ve come where I’m supposed to come. You should now take care of Saranya and Appa!”
The moment I woke up, I couldn’t stop telling this to everyone who’d gathered around. I had an odd clarity and it took a while for Saran to ground me. Then I figured it could just be my brain coping with the grief. But I couldn’t toss out the possibility of it being something that I don’t fully understand. Dreams are a weird zone to make any hard assumptions. As someone already predisposed to the world of dreams and dream journaling, I resorted to recording every dream that followed. I jotted down every variable I could keep track of. My meds, the time I took them, the events that happened during the day, all of it!
My psychiatrist, my therapist, dad, and Saran, all were against it, but I kept my ritual … until my antidepressant dosage increased and broke it after a few months. But I kept seeing my mom in my dreams.
And then Saran’s passing crucified me and tore my soul into pieces. As a breathing carcass, I couldn’t even tell day from night, let alone remember dreams. After weeks, when I became barely functional and the initial shock spared me some mercy, I saw Saran finally. As innocent as always, she was on a chair, playing with a pup. It was in my childhood home (a recurring place in my dreams). I walked to her, partially aware of the dream, and knelt down in tears. She looked at me confused. She was totally unaware of what had happened to her. Once again life (or whatever that drives it) showed me it can get even more brutal. I broke the news to my Saran. It’s the most agonizing dream of my life! She panicked and broke down. Before I could console her, the dream collapsed.
After all the ketamine infusions, one wretched night, I woke up … in another dream. It was my childhood home again and I immediately realised I was in a dream. It took a few moments to calibrate myself and get my footing. I walked outside to find Saran, but it was empty. Everything about the geography was just as I remembered the place. The street, the sight of the Western Ghats from my home, all looked the same, except for a few missing buildings.
Since then, my lucid dream frequency increased substantially, likely due to the shift in neuroplasticity from the ketamine sessions. In a different world, I’d be writing about the ones where I got to experience flight, alien architectures, civilizations, but what I’m focused on now is all about reaching my wife and mom without collapsing the dream.
My ritual is back. And I know where I’m going.
Footnotes
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I couldn’t experience the K-hole the third day. Apparently my brain had developed a rapid resistance to ketamine as they administered them in a short span of time. ↩