Storytelling Week 14: Deep Slumber

Galaxy Photo found on Wikimedia Commons

"The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they?" Shane asked, startling Jenny out of her reverie.

She looked over at her friend across the clearing. "Huh? Yeah, yeah, they're gorgeous," she paused before continuing. "Sorry I was just thinking."

Looking back up at the crystal clear sky, Jenny's mind wandered again. The stars were clustered so close together that they seemed to form a shimmering puddle of liquid light across the sky. If she concentrated hard enough, she could feel herself floating through it, her thoughts sliding easily to the farthest reaches of the universe.

She did not notice Shane watching her expectantly until she said, "Well, what are you thinking about?"

Jenny shook her head slightly before turning her head back toward Shane. "I just heard something interesting the other day and it made me think," she started. "You know how, when you're dreaming, everything feels so real. You can never really tell you're dreaming until you wake up?"

Here she stopped, waiting for Shane's answer. When she nodded her head, Jenny continued. "Well, I was just thinking, what if this is just a dream? Or what if this is someone else's dream and we are just characters in it. And when they wake up, we disappear, only to reappear in a different form when they go to sleep again."

Shane's eyes widened before she laughed, eyes crinkling. "You're thinking too much! You have to just appreciate what is happening now because if this is a dream, there's nothing we can do but enjoy the stars and the time we have!"

Jenny paused and looked up at the sky again. She smiled, first at the stars, and then back at Shane. "You're probably right, I'm just overthinking things."

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, both watching the stars so intensely that they noticed them begin to dim. One by one, they went out until finally-

****

Nina groaned, yanking her pillow over her head as her alarm told her it was time to get up. She had to leave for class in a few minutes, but before she left she reached into her nightstand to get her dream journal. She always had the most vivid dreams, and this had been one of the strangest ones yet. 

As she hastily wrote it down, she skimmed through the rest of her dream journal. Maybe one day she would figure it all out, but for now, she was running late.

Author's Notes

This story was inspired by the Pattanaik video and the story on Narayan's sleep cycle as the cycle of the rebirth of the universe. When Narayan is awake, the universe exists, but it stops when he is sleeping. For my story, I decided to switch it up and have the dream state as a universe of it's own. This was just a fun little story that I kind of think about a lot and the video this week reminded me of it. 

Reading Diary A Week 14: Pattanaik

1. It's interesting to think about people's perspectives on what is strange being influenced by what they were raised with. We talk a lot about that in my anthropology class.

2. I loved the story about Ganesha running around his parents three times. It was an interesting insight into the matters of subjectivity and the importance of it in life. 

3. The importance of empathy when analyzing or studying another culture is rightly emphasized in this video. We talk about ethnocentrism and how detrimental it is to cross-cultural interactions and I like the way this video analyzes and breaks that down in the example of Hinduism. 

4. I love the idea of divinity being formless and people creating forms for the divine in order to understand it. It's an interesting idea and it shows how complicated and abstract our forms of understanding and communicating are.

5. The story of the two warrior goddesses who did not marry because it would domesticate them was very interesting.

6. The idea of subjective truths was my favorite part of the first video. 

7. Narayan's sleep cycle and the idea of the rebirth of the universe is very interesting. It's an interesting insight into the lives of Hindus. I like the idea that it explains the urgency in some cultures and the lack of it in others. 

8. It's also interesting to think about the question of whether or not something exists if it is not consciously observed or thought of. And I love the question of whether or not we create the world with our observations or if the universe created us.

Statue of Vishnu: Image found on Wikimedia Commons