Originally published in Desilicious. All international copyrights are retained by the author. c.2003 Raywat Deonandan

Destroyer of Worlds

In a dream, I sit in the Clarchen Ballhaus in Berlin on ladies' night, waiting for Marlene Dietrich to slither across the dance floor, deposit herself onto my welcoming lap, tip back her top-hat, and spew a luminous funnel of unfiltered cigarette smoke from her painted lips.

In another, I am written into an adolescent science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, destined to fall into the arms of a domineering small-town teenage girl before I am shipped off on a rocket mission to re-conquer Venus.

In others, I am loveless and barren, forsaken and forlorn.

"I had two dreams about you this week," Tanya says. My ears prick up, more alert than anytime since a past lover's husband had unpredictably entered the apartment. "In the first dream," she continues, "we were having a coffee, then you kissed me. I had to stop you because, you know, I have a boyfriend."

"And in the second?"

"In the second dream, I didn't stop you."

"And how was I?" Her eyelids flutter and she giggles in that nasty fake baritone that only women can master. And that's where it had to end. After she's had me in a dream, how can I, a real man who doesn't go away with the dawn, compare? No ego, my friend, is that secure.

I had two dreams about Diamando this past week. In the first, I'm in the airport parking lot. I look up and see her frowning down at me from a Calvin Klein billboard; she was goddess-like in her stature and radiance. In the second dream, she and I switch bodies and begin to dance. I think it was the samba. But instead of exploring our new anatomy, all we were concerned about was who got to lead.

Illogic is the mantra of the dream state, chaos its mode and tack. Yet order springs from the jumble, a story percolates and the ego imposes a relevance oft mistaken for spirituality.

In the tradition of my people, the god Vishnu sleeps at the centre of the world, dreaming the universe, causing its being. From his navel grows a lotus, and on that lotus sits the quantum- mechanical god Brahma. Brahma opens his eyes and a world comes into existence. He closes his eyes and a world vanishes from existence. If Vishnu were to shift his colossal body in sleep, disturbing Brahma in his wakefulness, perhaps the lotus-sitter would blink, and all would be naught.

I am a destroyer of worlds, a divine egoist, the ultimate mood killer. A thousand lives blink into being with the start of my unconscious cinema, and a thousand more are quietly extinguished as I slip back into wakefulness. I am a creator of worlds, ephemeral and transient, wherein thin lives shimmer and etiolate, servicing my will yet tormenting my id.

To have dreamt a world is to have willed new life from the blackness. Contemplations on the origins of life usually begin with the accidents of electrochemistry and the violent swirling of sweet primordial soup, thick as Indian dahl, that spits forth blobs of organic goop. From this follows the accidental collisions of simple molecules into organic strings, eventually into amino and nucleic acids, and from there to the stirring of unconscious life.

Sometimes I wonder if we are indeed organic machines that have developed the magic of consciousness, or if we are instead pure intellect that has learned to express itself in the physical world. Perhaps there exists a vast field of intelligence, pan-dimensional and incomprehensible, that pops and percolates, occasionally protruding and projecting into the thin and inconsequential plane of physical existence. Is there, then, intelligence in every atom, a shadow of a soul haunting every quark and neutrino? If so, then we are indeed the dream, existing at the pleasure of the dreamer. All matter becomes but a state of awareness.

But these are distractions and rationalizations, paths into the darkness of intellect, away from the light of mindless beauty, that realm of intended quantum restfulness.

I dreamed once of plains of perfection, on which all failed loves repaired and rejoiced. Therein lies the power of that world, its lesson to be transported to the wakeful. Its events are plastic and nonsensical, transcending logic and reason. Yet its feel is contentment, proving that satisfaction can issue from formless irrationality. To stray from the intellect is indeed bliss.

"Tomorrow is Tuesday," Sneha whispers to me seductively through the soma ether, and I howl in laughter, as if it is the funniest joke I've ever heard. There is no sense in dream-time, no reason for sadness, humour, anger or titillation. Emotions erupt from the id without first being summoned; there are no rules. It is a quantum mechanical thing, wherein effect can comfortably precede cause, laughter precede the joke, and love precede acquaintanceship.

Thus is the comfort of Vishnu and Brahma. They are the sleeping and sleepwalking gods, icons to the weird set of quantum formulae. Our world, their dream, is stoked by the irrational, spiced with the unpredictable and pricked by the nonsensical.

In a dream, I lie next to my beloved, ecstatic in halcyon slumber. Her breath sings in time with my own, the cadence reaching beneath the conscious to the next dream, then below that to the dream of the fundament. Ours is an orchestra of sleep, bound in rhythm to the dance of the quantum gods, and played with love and tranquillity. My beloved arises and rubs the sleep from her eyes. She thinks to herself, "I am a destroyer of worlds, a divine egoist, the ultimate mood killer."