Life ahead

I guess thats all the time I had for this blog. Time to move on. After all they say....

"Dreams r not those which are seen during sleep, dreams r those which will never let you sleep. So, have dreams & work hard to make them true"

Cheers,
R

I can also be found blogging here http://rajivmo.blogspot.com/

My Tweets can be followed at http://twitter.com/rajivmo

The fallout and subsequent pattern of dreams

I had a very bad fallout with I. Life was pretty much hell for me after that but gradually I came to grips with the practicality of it. Over the course of days, the subject of my dreams changed from abstract romantic dreams to things pondering over my past. I mostly started viewing my school teachers and saw myself climbing the endless stairs in my school or sometimes chatting with my school teachers seeking their advice in my dreams. In one dream I saw I and me returning home from school and after walking half the way we came across an intersection where we had to part ways to head to our respective homes. That was the last I saw of I, in my dreams... and maybe forever in reality. They say the world is small and you stumble upon estranged friends when you least expect, but I would definitely not like to speculate about the future.

The nuclear fusion experiment

Late one evening as we were chatting, I and I had a debate as to why god entrusted women with the divine task of creation of life. According to me men due to their physical strength and endurance are better suited for the job. At the end of the chat, I still did not get any logical answer. Little did I know about the weirdness of the dream I was to see that night.


--------------------------------------------------
4.00 am March 1 2009

I find myself in a research laboratory. It was 20 years into the future, well almost 20, since i was still perfectly strong. A global nuclear war had broken out. My elder brother had been drafted into the navy. It was mandatory for all to join the forces; however only the robust guys were selected. I luckily escaped being in the forces due to my prior experience as a technology research scientist. I was assigned to do research on how to harness energy needed for the war. Suddenly a divine force (like the guy opposite to Oracle in the last of the matrix series) appeared before me and explained the concept of practically achievable nuclear fusion to me. Controlled fusion had still not been achieved till then since the LHC(large hadron collider) in Geneva was in shambles due to alien bombardment.

God or the divine being told me that controlled fusion will only be possible inside a human being. I told him that I have the physical strength to endure it, but he insisted that only a woman's body is capable enough to tolerate it and make the experiment successful. It was here that I asked him why should males not be selected for the internal nuclear fusion since we have the physical power and endurance. The divine power vanished and a gal descended from above in the form of an angel.

Due to the nuclear war India was more colder country and the temperatures outside were below 0 degrees. It was freezing moonlight; the angel descended. I told her "I am going to start a controlled fusion inside you. Once it starts you will need a lot of cooling, which even the in-house AC plant will be unable to provide".She said, "I will gladly tolerate it, but will have to remain outside in the sub zero temperatures, floating in mid air so that I do not disturb the temperature balance on earth due to conduction".

She remained in that perfectly floating self-balanced state and I managed to harness an enormous amount of energy. Finally nearing the end of the experiment, she descended back to my lab. As she was about to descend, I saw her skin melting away due to the enormous amount of heat she was producing. I hugged her before I thought she would disintegrate. I got a huge jolt of heat energy in return, but she was unconscious already. She lay motionless in my arms for what seemed like eternity to me. Tears went down from my eyes. Those were the final moments I had with her.

--------------------------------------------------

Since I did not remember anything after that, I presume I lost her. It was so emotional and heart wrenching. I never saw a more heart wrenching dream than this. She risked everything for mankind, but lay motionless in the end. It was so saddening, I never was reduced to tears so easily ever in my dreams.

Sigh

My growing fascination with I and the beginning of eerie coincidence

In just a few weeks, a strong attraction grew between me and I and we shared a mutual connect at a mental level. Most of the times we would outguess each other which I referred to as reading minds. This eerie dream took place early in the morning one day. Only later would we come to know that we both had been dreaming the same things interpreted from different angles. Infact this coincidence had amazed I to such a level that she mentioned that this goes to her blog. Since it never went to her blog, it goes to mine now.

----------------------------------

As I travel in a Volvo on my way back from Bombay to Pune, I am so engrossed with the events of the day that completely forget to check who is giving me company on the adjacent seat. Oh its I . I am happy to see her, but cursing myself all the while as to how I could miss her for almost the entire duration of what could have been an even more pleasant journey. I whisper some sweet nothings into her ear. She gives me a quizzical look as her face becomes hazy again and I sleep within my own dream.

I wake up after having crossed a place that seemed to resemble Aundh in Pune, only to find I not in my adjacent seat anymore. I immediately get down and take an autorickshaw and frantically search for I in each and every gulli of old Pune i.e ABC Chowk, Laxmi Road etc where even the auto drivers have the faintest of idea of the roads. All the while I look extremely troubled and bewildered. I leave the auto and run across the roads of Central Pune. I keep running and running........

-----------------------------------

Only to be woken up by mom. Why does mom have to come and wake me up from some of my best dreams ever. Later in the day as I discuss this dream with I, I realize that I saw something similar only she mistook the inside air conditioned ambience the volvo interiors to the lounge of an airport. And later she told that I had the same troubled look in her dream.

Glad to find a dream-sharer now.

The roller coaster ride

The year 2008 was a very eventful year. It was nothing short of a roller coaster ride for me. Found myself selected for longterm projects in the US and UK. Got my long term work permits for UK and H1B for US done. But then my search for the real meaning in life starts. In the month of April one of my close friends made a stark comment that would change the course of my life.

Do you care for short term gains(onsite trips) or long term profits(MBA) ?

This friend of mine eventually went on to do her MBA in Narsee Monjee, Bombay. However the question sparked a huge debate in my mind on whether money is important or power. I can go to my dreamland called the US for longterm and make big bucks there but what am I at the end of 3-4 years ? Just a simple programmer / developer and nothing more than a puppet in the hands of bigwigs. Or else I can do an MBA and move on to managerial or consulting roles within the same timeframe. Somehow I could never realize my true calling among the teeming mass of software engineers, and my fascination for power and positions of responsibility made me shirk all the money and I decided to call it quits in the later part of the year

My professional learning was over however the months that ensued were the best in terms of personal learning and analysing the truths of life. I would scalpel dissect each and every facet of life where I had gone wrong and what could I have done to make it right. All those truths of life would come later in some post or maybe in some other blog.

However all this caused my grey cells go on to the turbo mode and took a toll on me. Forget dreams, I could barely sleep in the nights. The subsequent economic recession ensured that I would not get a high profile job compared to the one I had, after the exam season and my career-break. This put a huge pressure on me to perform in the exams. Needless to say I scored less than the earlier year in all the exams.

So, I decided to put all vigour into GD/PIs of the institues that I got calls for. In the process I made some excellent friends most notable of whom I would call I(no its not me, its the name of my best friend in those times who shared a lot of common likes, tastes and aspirations with me and was one of the few girls who would connect with me on an intellectual level).

Online/Offline Dreams

Before you go on to ask me anything more on the weird topic of this post, it would definitely help you to know something about the geek in me. My musings as a programmer were recorded in my first blog here rajivmohapatra.blogspot.com

After I finished my bachelor's degree in engineering I went on to be a software engineer designing mainframe systems for Fortune 500 BFSI clients. I have a habit of taking my work very very personally. Sometimes so personally that I design entire program modules in dreams and many lines of code start appearing in my dreams.

This particular dream happened on one fateful day when I was supposed to be running the mainframe batch streams for the general housekeeping jobs to keep the data environment in good shape. The archaic age-old systems that mainframes are, most of the systems and programs were written and maintained long before I materialised on planet earth. Every technology that my engineering books termed outdated and my teachers refrained from delving deep into, appeared to be very much the lifeline of the global financial world and of my worklife as well. Infact relational databases which appeared as early as the 1970s were not dominantly used in the client's systems. The hierarchial IMS-DB databases that I had to mess with had a unique characteristic. In the Online mode during the day people have access to the data-stores where as in the Offline batch mode(mostly in the night and early morning) only the programs and jobs have access to data.

I was assigned to arrive early in the morning and run the offline batch streams successfully to completion after which the data environments would be online for the day. However it so happened that some developer had managed to screw the data and my job-runs were unsuccessful. After a lot of hullabaloo it was decided to abandon the job-runs in the half-run states before the data environment went online. Needless to say my entire day went on pondering as to how could things have turned out perfect.

------------------------------------------
Time - 3.15 am Indian Standard Time

All the batch streams flash before my eyes. I see a humongous number of batch jobs running on the screen and suddenly all of them abend(whenever a job does not complete successfully its termed an ABnormal ENDing or abend). And in the next second another flash
ALL ENVIRONMENTS ARE ONLINE

------------------------------------------

Man what a nightmare. And as I lay in my bed, I keep pondering, why couldn't I find any solution for it. Needless to say, I never had any nightmare with such tenacity before. And however hard I tried to sleep afterwards I could not sleep. Eventually I read a book and as the clock showed 6 am I went on to get prepared for office, who knows what lays in store for me in the day ahead, maybe I will find a solution to my problem.

Starting on a brand new day...

Interpretation of Dreams

Scientists say the higher your IQ, the more you dream. So, considering the fact that my IQ is 137 which is pretty higher than Einstein's, I am bound to dream more.

Dreams have always been more than a fantasy world for me. I view them as an astral projections to another dimension where everything is purely driven by our thoughts to accomplish our aspirations that seem impossible in the real world. There is also a spiritual angle to the dream world and it is acknowledged as a higher level to human existence that we experience on earth. More on the spiritual theory on dreams in some later post.

So the million dollar question - do you really consider dreams as dreams ?

How do you know you are not dreaming right now? What is it that convinces you that what you are experiencing now is “real”? Is it that others agree with you? What if they, like in your sleeping dreams, are dream characters in another dream? How can you trust what you are experiencing? In your sleeping dreams, don’t the characters act and sound like they are real? Don’t they work to convince you that they are real? You could be dreaming at this instant! In the next instant you could awaken on a couch or bed and say, “Wow, what a vivid, realistic dream I just had!” Consider for a moment that those who you trusted to teach you about this dimension (like your parents) might be dream characters, too; that like your sleeping dreams, you create all the characters, situations, and backgrounds (like houses, yards, fields, forests, etc.). If this dimension were a dream, then who is responsible for and creating every bit of it? If you are dreaming, you are the creator of it all.

If you like my way of thinking read on, for this blog is specially created for all you folks out there. My topic of dreams usually vary a lot. My dreams are a consequence of my mental states. Sometimes, I am a teenager enjoying in a beach with beauties doing things which are unmentionable in a country like India and unthinkable in a place like the temple city of India. Sometimes, I am frantically falling from a skyscraper, running endlessly as the protagonist in the movie Apocalypto, or sometimes racing on the highway on a superbike with front wheel automatically popping up at higher revs leading to a wheelie. Rest of the times, I am just in some twisted story. Many of these bittersweet twisted sci-fi out of the world stories are going to follow in the posts to follow. Happy reading :)