Well of Dreams
A recollection of two dreams from the same day, both marked by an uncanny déjà vu that seemed to originate not from waking life, but from within other dreams.
I. 9 am
Had an interesting dream. I was in some school/college-like place, pretty much immersed in the daily chores of assignments and study. Then a few days passed, and I woke up in class in the middle of a lecture — my parents had been called because of something I'd really messed up. The situation was more depressing than I had thought; I had lost some important documents, and unless I found them, it would be a big mess-up. I was going to be deported. As it was happening, I went to the school park, trying to relax there, lying in the grass. Then suddenly my dream switched to something very exotic — I was traveling by boat across a big lake, surrounded by beautiful, lush green mountains. It was a tropical environment with a mix of mist and gloomy sunlight. Beside me was a girl, and I felt like the protagonist in a film. I can't remember much, but I remember the surreal feeling.
After traveling through the lake, we landed on the shore and encountered a beautiful unicorn with dragon-like wings, made up of glistening particles. But something felt really familiar in the dream — it was like déjà vu, but inside the dream itself. That is, I felt like I'd seen all of this in some movie before, but then I realized I didn't actually know a movie like this in real life. Then it hit me — this movie must have been something I'd seen in some other dream too! This is crazy: I saw a movie inside a dream, a movie that doesn't even exist. By the way, it had a South Indian movie vibe — in terms of the actor and actress.
II. 7 pm
Had another wild dream, just woke up from an afternoon nap. Frankly speaking, I don't remember much and I'm still trying hard to recall it — I think much of it will have to be improvised now. I'll call it the "Déjà Vu Nested Dream":
In the dream, I was in some not-so-distant future, where we had a futuristic way of watching movies — more like feeling them. It was similar to VR, but much more immersive, and you could experience it in multiple different ways: like a game, a roleplay with limited control, an eagle-eye third-person view, etc.
In that dream, I had already watched a movie and was currently re-experiencing it. I was on a space station — more like a spaceship, similar to the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey — near Earth's orbit, with the whole Earth visible from the deck view. I was away from the main drama playing out on the deck, over in the engine room, fiddling, toggling, and experimenting with different instruments and technology — you could say I was being a curious cat.
But then I remembered that some major plot event was about to occur on the deck, one I couldn't miss. I called out to the "movie AI" to pause the movie, a HUD appeared, I pressed pause, and ran toward the deck as fast as I could. Once there, I resumed play — and oh my god:
A nuclear war had just started on Earth! Warheads were destroying cities one after another. The explosions were so powerful that a small meteor got pushed into our trajectory, and we had to maneuver our ship just to miss it.
Then a switch happened, and I was on Earth — our spaceship had crashed there. I was viewing everything in eagle-eye mode. It was the last surviving city on Earth, ruled by a ruthless fascist government using a surveillance state. I saw a woman uttering some radical words to her friends, and she got hit by a sniper, in slow motion.
Then I woke up. I was in deep introspection afterward, because I think there's some kind of common thread linking many of my dreams — I keep feeling déjà vu inside one dream about events from another dream. Those events, I can never remember.