Dreams, Bergmans, Poesies Et Al

By Prerna Munshi

It was in one of those odd hours, when she fell asleep, on a springy afternoon. Reclining on her arm chair, holding a Neruda close to her bosom, she wandered in her dreamy boulevards. Nestled in her Pashmina, she slept like the Ocean. Just like the Ocean that sleeps snuggling its Azure.

She formed a perfect verse in her sleep. She was awed at her own creation. Lines formed on their own to form sonnets. She had never written such poesies while awake. A little later, her thoughts, vagrant and bespattered as they were, moved to Wild Strawberries, Persona and Cries and Whispers. The red walled mansion in Cries and Whispers whelmed her in its blood red. The perfect white satin drapes on the red walls was a lethal contrast. ‘Who directed them?’, she soliloquized in her sleep.  She couldn’t remember the name howsoever she tried. That one anxious thought to find the name out did its dizzying rounds in her insides. 

Agitated, she woke up. “What was his name? Yes Yes… Bergman… Ingmar Bergman”, she recollected. She was relieved. “But what were the verses, I saw?” She couldn’t remember them, at all. 

That was a perfect dream and she lost it to her subconscious. The only thing that remained was the fragrance of it, a vague opalescence of its subliminal presence. She draped herself in the scent of her dreamy yet enchanting verses, the way the unknown lover, one makes love to the previous night, leaves behind a faint fragrance, the origin of which cannot be traced. The scent stays like a wistful lingering sigh. And, so did her dreamy verses.

By Prerna Munshi