Gasping For Breath

“Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure full of significance.”

-Sigmund Freud

It was sometime when I was ten or eleven years old. We used to stay in one portion of an independent house. There used to be four such portions each on either side of the road. During Mahashivratri it used to be a tradition that members of all the families spend time together in the huge corridor on the opposite side of my house. The whole night kids used to play a lot of indigenous games, elders used to have their own ways of keeping themselves engaged and at around 2 am or so there used to be a devotional movie in the Doordarshan which all of us used to sit and watch together. On one such day, at around midnight, I had to come back home alone for some reason which I don’t remember. When I opened the kitchen door I felt that there is someone moving in the dark and got very scared. Immediately I closed the door, locked the house and returned to the venue. I didn’t even share this fear with anyone in my family. In the early morning, I heard my neighbors saying that there was a theft in one of the nearby houses and somehow I could relate my fear with that news.

Across the years of my life, never did this episode come to the surface but however in the year 2015, I had a nightmare. I still remember the content of the dream. The same house when I had to open the kitchen door at midnight, someone moving in the dark. However, the fear manifested further wherein the person has noticed me and tried to attack with a knife. The moment he came closer is when I immediately woke up gasping for breath and could not sleep after that.

 

When I analyse this, I realize that the fearful incidents of one’s childhood repressed into the unconscious for whatever may be the reason will find their ways to reach to the surface in the form of dreams.